Saturdays with Seniors, Live and In Person

Thanks for all the sweet comments to Wednesday’s blog post about leading memoir-writing class in-person again. A few of you requested I let you know how “opening day” played out, so here I am with some highlights:

• My good pants still fit
• Luna emptied during her morning constitutional – welcome news
• The cab I ordered arrived late – unwelcome news
• Everything I’ve heard about drivers ignoring speed limits during the pandemic proved true
• Cab driver floored it on Lake Shore Drive
• Luna and I arrived at The Admiral just a few minutes late
• I had the right amount of cash on hand to tip the driver
• The temperature check at the front entrance came out normal
• Barbara, the class organizer, was right there to direct us to the conference room we were meeting in
  

  We’re on the road again.

The writers cheered when we entered the conference room and were especially excited to meet Luna. Barbara led me to a seat at the table that was socially distanced from others seated there. The four or five who couldn’t fit sat socially distanced behind us, a peanut gallery of sorts. I don’t give writing assignments during breaks from class but I do encourage those itching to write to do so on their own and bring those essays along to read out loud during the first class. A majority of them did just that, and when Bindy Bitterman was called on to read first, we readied ourselves for something uniquely Bindy.

She did not disappoint.

After pulling her mask down to read, she started her essay with a question. “Remember the song ‘Que Sera, Sera’?” From there, she belted out the first part of the 1956 Doris Day hit song for us. What can I say? Joy, laughter and applause comes through a lot better in person than over Zoom! For an encore, she sang her personalized-for-Bindy version: “Will I be published? I won’t be rich! That’s what I say to me!” Bindy has been trying two years to get her children’s limerick book, Skiddly Diddly Skat,” published, and she used the rest of her 500 words to share some good news. A mishap with her laptop required her to get help retrieving lost data. The data retrieval recovered long-lost information of an artist who been a friend of her late husband and the two got back in touch. “Self-publishing didn’t appeal to me before, but now it feels perfectly do-able,” she read with joy in her voice. “No, I won’t make money at it, and yes, it will cost a lot — Rich is much younger than I, and this is how he earns his living — but this style fits Skiddly so perfectly it’s bound to be a hit!”

What a great start to the in-person class. Being in the room to hear others read their essays was so moving, many of them featuring personal encounters in the past with family members, caring for a grandson who’d been born prematurely and is now a healthy teenager, making friends with a man who happen to sit next to him on a flight — back when strangers were used to sitting together on flights. A piece one writer wrote about how Zoom helped her survive the pandemic served to remind us that holding class online this past year was downright amazing.

At the end of class I took Luna’s harness off and welcomed those interested to come on over and pet her. When she rolled on her back for bellyrubs I knew for certain: Luna prefers in-person learning.