You know where we’re having dinner tonight? At the White Sox-Cleveland game!

It’ll be different than the last game we went to in 2019, to be sure. We’re assigned to a section and we can’t roam the park and hang out on the outfield concourse like we usually do. But I’ll float on the aroma of grilled onions and tubular meats like Bugs Bunny levitates to the smell of carrot stew.

I feel like a six-year-old on the day before Christmas.

COVID anniversaries these past few weeks have driven home how much we’ve all gone through together. Indeed, we’re not out. But Beth and I will celebrate immunity day this Wednesday, marking two weeks after our second Pfizer vaccination. We’re daring to believe the light at the end of the tunnel is not the headlight of a train.

This morning, during our twice-yearly phone meeting with Gus’ caseworker, his nurse, and his house manager, Beth and I came away assured that the transition from Bethesda to Broadstep—the new owner/operator of Gus’ group home in Wisconsin—is going well.

Even better, we learned that after this Wednesday we can visit him! He and his housemates and staff received their second shots weeks ago, we’ll be fully vaccinated, so On Wisconsin!

Finally, just this morning I learned from Beth that the Bangles song Just Another Manic Monday was written and performed originally by Prince. I can’t believe I didn’t know that.

And so, tonight at the game I’m going to party like it’s 1999. Please continue to take care, and happy Monday everybody!

Today’s guest blogger, Cynthia Jones.

I am pleased to feature Cynthia Jones as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. After a long career in nursing and social work, Cynthia officially retired in 2013 and before March, 2020, had been working part-time at City of Chicago senior centers and a residential facility for people with chronic mental illness. Her furlough is our gain: she now has time to participate in the memoir-writing class I lead via Zoom on Thursday afternoons.

Goodbye Alexandra

by Cynthia Jones

I dressed myself and my one-week old daughter carefully for the meeting. I knew the impression we made would be important and lasting. As part of our adoption agreement, we were to meet Mariah’s birthmother and maternal grandmother at the adoption agency today, the day Alexandra would sign the final paper to relinquish her parental rights.

I was functioning on automatic pilot so as not to get bogged down in my emotions and become unable to prepare. Fear that Alexandra had changed her mind about giving up Mariah. Fear that Alexandra wouldn’t like me and forever feel bad about the adoption. Guilt about “taking” Alexandra’s child. most importantly, not wanting to be flooded with memories and associated feelings about that long ago day when I was the unmarried 20-year-old birth mother signing away my own newborn.

Mariah and I hadn’t yet established the synchronous flow that develops between a mother and her infant. We’d only had 2 days together. But she was my second child so I felt confident in handling and caring for her.

The drive was long and silent with our dread. The social worker my husband and I had met at the hospital met us at the reception desk, whispered that Alexandra had already signed the papers, and ushered us into a conference room.

At least this no longer felt like an audition. Alexandra and her mother, Gwen, sat side by side. Mariah was asleep in her carrier. We sat across the table. I noticed Alexandra’s beautiful sweet smile. I don’t remember much about the conversation except that it was uncomfortable.

Fortunately, my wonderful husband had thought to bring a photo album with pictures of us with our son Josh on happy occasions. It was a perfect ice breaker and gave Alexandra a chance to see Mariah’s new brother.

We’d been told by the social worker that Alexandra and her mom wanted to keep her baby and raise her, but since Alexandra and her family were white and Mariah’s father African American, her father was absolutely against having Mariah in the family. We learned that Alexandra had lived in her parents’ home throughout her pregnancy. After about 20 minutes of that conversation, Mariah woke up crying and hungry. I was prepared with a bottle and settled to feed her.

It was then that I noticed Alexandra was crying. My heart broke for her, and I asked if she wanted to feed Mariah (which I’m sure was against agency policy). Alexandra nodded and I placed Mariah in her arms and the bottle in her hand. She had long brown hair which cascaded over both their faces as she leaned forward to feed her daughter one last time. Mariah made satisfied sucking sounds while Alexandra continued to cry softly. Gwen put her arm comfortingly around her grieving daughter as she, too, cried softly. I tried my best not to cry, but tears streamed down my face, too. So much mother grief in that small room.

After Mariah emptied the bottle, Gwen said softly, “Give her back to her mother now.” This time my heart shattered as Alexandra placed Mariah back in my arms.

I just got word that the Justice Department has moved to intervene in a disability discrimination lawsuit brought by private plaintiffs with visual disabilities alleging the City of Chicago fails to provide people who are blind, have low vision, or are deaf-blind with equal access to pedestrian signal information at intersections.

Sighted pedestrians can see flashing “Walk/Don’t Walk” signs and countdown timers to alert them when it is safe to cross the street. We can’t see them. Devices providing pedestrians with safe-crossing information through audible tones, speech messages, and vibrotactile surfaces do exist, but few intersections in Chicago offer them.

Chicago currently provides visual crossing signals for sighted pedestrians at nearly 2,700 intersections, but it has only installed Accessible Pedestrian Signals (APS) at a mere 15 city intersections. The proposed suit alleges that the lack of accessible pedestrian signals at over 99 percent of Chicago’s signalized intersections subjects people who are blind, have low vision, or are deaf-blind to added risks and burdens not faced by sighted pedestrians, including fear of injury or death.

I’ve come across accessible pedestrian signals in other cities we’ve visited — Madison, Wisconsin comes to mind, and Urbana, Illinois has a few — but those were inconsistent. At some intersections hearing “beep, beep, beep” meant I should cross, and at others it meant I should stay put. Looking for the button to press to activate the Accessible pedestrian signals got me off-track and made it hard to find the crosswalk again. Sometimes the beep, beep beep noise was so loud it made it difficult to hear and judge the traffic surge. I pitied the poor people who lived and worked near one of the APS and have to hear it all the time.

When I was newly blind and learning to use a white cane, orientation and mobility (O&M) instructors taught me to rely on the surge of traffic at my parallel to recognize when the signal is green and it’s safe to walk. That principle is reinforced every time I travel to Morristown, New Jersey to train with a new Seeing Eye dog. In fact, at the Seeing Eye, one isn’t eligible to be matched with a dog without having completed O&M training.

Dogs are color blind. Seeing Eye dogs can’t read the stoplights, so it’s not their job to determine when it’s safe to cross a busy street. They are trained to go right up to every curb at each street crossing they get to, stop right there, and trust their human partner to use their sense of hearing to figure out what direction traffic is moving. Once we’re certain that traffic is flowing the same direction we want to travel, we give our dogs the command to cross. Dogs are trained to keep an eye out and to disobey their partner if the team is in harm’s way. It’s called intelligent disobedience, and it’s a pretty difficult thing to ask the dogs to do, when you think about it.

Traffic in Chicago has changed immensely in the year Luna has been with me — things started out normal in February. Then came the COVID shutdowns in March. Cars were few and far between, making it difficult to rely on my sense of sound to judge traffic flow. “Is the light green?” With so few people out and about, there was no one to ask.

Traffic increased again when things opened up in the summer, then decreased again when a surge in COVID forced another shutdown in fall. I’ve made my share of bad decisions at intersections during these times, and I cringe to think that onlookers are blaming my young new Seeing eye dog Luna when it’s me who made the mistake.

So I’m no longer skeptical when it comes to accessible pedestrian signals. Do I need one at every corner? No. Be selective and put them at particularly difficult intersections — the T-intersection down the street at Dearborn & Polk comes to mind. I need all the help I can get at that one. You know what else would help? Mike tells me that most intersections display countdowns until the light next changes. Simply making those audible would be a great help. And as long as I’m getting greedy, can you please make sure I don’t have to locate a button to make the thing work?

Yesterday marked an anniversary: It was on April 4, 2020 that the City of Chicago officially released me from my voluntary COVID quarantine at a city-operated hotel. I was self-isolating after a weeklong stay at Northwestern. Doctors didn’t want me to go home until I was fever free for three days—the worry was that I might infect Beth, who, having been a type 1 diabetic for 55 years, was at greater risk for severe symptoms if she got COVID.

I got sprung a year ago.

I really wanted to just come home, but after I thought about it, the hotel was the right decision. And heck, I had a nice room (and I couldn’t leave) and three times a day I’d get a knock on my door and find a bag full of hotel bar food. (The Buffalo chicken sandwich is highly recommended.)

It was a more or less happy anniversary, though it had me flashing back to some scary times. I hope that this last week was, for me, personally, my final farewell to the whole damn episode. Last Wednesday Beth and I got our second vaccines.

And again, Beth was unfazed. And I got pretty sick for a day-and-a-half.

I felt a little funny and developed a headache during the cab ride home from the United Center vaccination site. Back in our apartment I got lightheaded and felt nauseated. “I feel funny,” I said to Beth. Recalling my passing out, falling and banging my head hard enough to have a little brain bleed a year ago, Beth simply said, “Go lie down!”

I did, and like last year when I fell ill, I got nasty chills. I fell into a deep sleep for several hours and woke up feeling washed out but otherwise fine.

I thought that was that until I woke up on Thursday morning with body aches and was dead tired. Back to bed and by Friday I was mostly fine except for the headache that persisted until Saturday.

It was if that spiky little bastard virus was taunting me: “Just a little more misery for old times sake?”

So, besides being Easter, yesterday was kind of a big deal. I outlasted the damn thing. Beth and I outlasted the damn thing.

And in those terrifying early days we leaned heavily on our friends and neighbors and family. Thank you. We are forever grateful.

Sadly, not everyone was as fortunate as I was.

That’s a picture, courtesy of my sister Marilee, of our Lincoln Park Village class meeting in 2016.

Happy anniversary! It’s been a year now that we’ve featured essays by writers in my memoir classes on the Safe & Sound blog every week. The writers in all my classes are on Spring Break now, so here I am with a short piece boasting about the strength they’ve exhibited since the shutdown in March 2020.

We all know this past year has been a real test of resilience, but if you’ve kept up with the weekly Saturdays with Seniors feature, I hope you’ve been buoyed by story after story from older adults armed with first-hand experience, knowledge and skills that have helped them cope with decades of challenges. To me it was no surprise to hear that studies are showing that older adults were less likely to experience pandemic-related anxiety, depression and stress then younger groups. From the Journal of the American Medical Association:

As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) began to spread in the US in early 2020, older adults experienced disproportionately greater adverse effects from the pandemic including more severe complications, higher mortality, concerns about disruptions to their daily routines and access to care, difficulty in adapting to technologies like telemedicine, and concerns that isolation would exacerbate existing mental health conditions, (but studies show that) older adults tend to have lower stress reactivity, and in general, better emotional regulation and well-being than younger adults.

An August 2020 survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed adults aged 65 and older were less likely to have anxiety, depression, and trauma or stress-related disorder (TSRD) than people in younger age groups. Results from some other studies:

• A study in Spain revealed that adults aged 60-80 had lower rates of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than adults age 40-59.
• A study in the Netherlands showed that, although loneliness increased during the pandemic, adults over age 65 didn’t see a big change in mental health.
• When 776 adults from the U.S. and Canada were asked to keep a diary about daily stressors, events, and the virus’ emotional impact, adults over age 60 more often reported positive events and emotions.

I started leading memoir-writing classes in 2005, which means I’ve had the privilege of hearing weekly stories of resilience for 16 years now. What have they taught me? That having people to lean on in difficult times can make a huge difference, and that, sometimes, the best we can do to stay strong is maintain and build those trusted relationships with others. So a big shout -out to all the writers who generously agreed to share their own 500-word personal stories with others every week on the Saturdays with Seniors feature here — enjoy your well-deserved Spring Breaks!