Monday’s with Mike: Do no harm, or least do your best

I had the day off last Monday, so I played hooky on the blog, too. Besides wanting a break, I really didn’t know how to do right by Dr. King, and so, my day of silence.

We had a terrific MLK weekend. We took the Metra commuter line to Glen Ellyn Saturday afternoon. Last time we took the train, we didn’t even have to buy tickets. This time one window was open at Ogilvie Transportation Center, and we bought tickets. It felt kinda normal. Sorta. Luckily, everyone was masked and the cars were pretty empty. Our friend Jenny picked us up and chauffeured us to her and her Husband Dean’s back yard.

The view from our room

It was pretty cold, but they have an enormous outdoor fireplace and Dean had constructed a sort of open-air enclosure that provided a roof and a wind break. Beth has been friends with Jenny, Dean, and Jenny’s sister Jill since…high school. And they still talk to each other! Actually, we have a gas together. Cocktails are involved.

Was it a risk? Not much of one. They’ve all been tested umpteen times in order to meet with their children and grandchildren. Beth and I have had it already, and I’d been tested that very morning.

The short of it: It was a very low risk effort with an extremely rich and much needed reward. Ain’t nothing like laughing out loud in the company of friends. Beats the hell out of LOLing virtually.

From there Beth and I got a Lyft to Geneva, Illinois, a sweet little town on the Fox River that we called home for a few years in the 1990s. We stayed at a beautiful, rustic hotel called the Herrington Inn. built in 1874, it was originally a creamer that had been meticulously restored and expanded by the time we moved to town. It’s right on the river, and from our balcony we could hear the water swirl by. On Sunday it snowed, and it was idyllic.

The town is almost painfully quaint with gift shops and little restaurants. And it’s just what the doctor ordered. Masks were prevalent. Except. There were several restaurants flying in the face of directives that were still in place last weekend. They were seating people inside, and the distancing was iffy. We walked by a bar and I was sorry to see that the bar was open with patrons three deep watching football. Most sans masks.

On Saturday night upon arrival, we ordered room service, and the next night we dined in a heated tent. Servers and patrons were masked.

We’ve been eating outdoors at our favorite Italian restaurant pretty regularly. It’s a fantastic place owned by a native of Milan, and his perfectionism comes through in the food and the service.

We don’t want it to go out of business. Once a week we share a propane heater and have a sumptuous meal. Staff is masked and meticulous about hygiene, and we keep our masks on as much as possible.

We’ve also had drinks at our local, Half Sour, which is permitted to have indoor guests only at tables that are adjacent to big open windows. We need to get out and they need business. We judge it to be a risk worth taking, and dressing for the cold is weirdly fun.

It’s been so hard on everyone. Many of the restrictions have seemed like blunt instruments. Here in Illinois, casinos opened before restaurants. If you serve food you can have limited indoor guests, but if you don’t—like our beloved Jazz Showcase—you’re out of luck.

On the other hand, the idiotic flaunting of wearing masks in the name of freedom is ridiculous. Freedom is not the absence of responsibility.

All this reminded me of an article in The Atlantic from way back in May. (It references a death toll of 70,000. Man.) The headline, way back on May 11, was “Quarantine Fatigue Is Real.”

The subhead was, “Instead of an all-or-nothing approach to risk prevention, Americans need a manual on how to have a life in a pandemic.”

It argued to take a harm reduction approach. It borrows from approaches to AIDs and drug use that don’t shame and don’t insist on abstinence so much as encourage less risky, safer behavior. From the article:

In the earliest years of the HIV epidemic, confusion and fear reigned. AIDS was still known as the “gay plague.” To the extent that gay men received any health advice at all, it was to avoid sex. In 1983, the activists Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, with guidance from the virologist Joseph Sonnabend, published a foundational document for their community, called “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Recognizing the need for pleasure in people’s lives, the pamphlet rejected abstinence as the sole approach and provided some of the earliest guidance on safer sex for gay men, including recommendations about condoms and which sex acts had a lower or higher risk for disease transmission.

The article’s author, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, suggested way back in May that wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and redesigning spaces could make life more livable in the time of Covid.

Everyone has a different threshold for risk—especially in these times. We have immunosuppressed friends who can’t take even small risks. And then we have friends who just got over the virus and feel comfortably safe for a few months.

Whatever your threshold, wear a mask and be careful out there.