Wedding day, July 28, 1984. Photo: Rick Amodt.

Everyone I know is coping remarkably well with the universal craziness of life today (all things considered), but everyone has bad days, sad days. Lately I’ve noticed a healthy tendency for people to just be honest about those times. It’s an oppressive time, and while I maintain hopes for better times ahead, those hopes are tenuous. So, today, I’m choosing to look back for relief and inspiration.

Tomorrow, Beth and I celebrate our 36th anniversary. The morning of July 28, 1984 started in the backyard of our friend Colleen’s parents in Hillside, Illinois. Colleen’s father, the late Judge John Keleher, officiated and our parents attended. It was modest and small and kind of perfect.

We were officially married in Cook County, but another ceremony and party took place later, in DuPage County, in another back yard—Beth’s late sister Bobbie and her husband Harry generously hosted the affair. Hosted doesn’t do it justice. They’d more or less planned their splendid garden around the event, and managed the logistics of tents, pig roasters, etc. Lots of Beth’s enormous family stepped up to help–brother-in-law, Rick Amodt, volunteered to take pictures.

Our friend Pick, who grew up in Rural Virginia as a Southern Baptist, had agreed to officiate the second ceremony, using the vows that Beth and I had written together.

A polka with the original Mike Knezovich, Mike’s late father. Photo: Rick Amodt.

It could’ve been hot. It could’ve rained. But the afternoon was sunny and comfortable with a breeze. It was sublime.

Here’s an account from Beth’s memoir, “Long Time No See” :

Flo walked me down the aisle, and my friends Anne and Colleen served as bridesmaids. When it came time for a toast, the nieces and nephews served Champagne. We’d hired a group of Mike’s dad’s buddies from the steel mill, Roland Kwasny and the Continentals, who moonlighted playing weddings and other functions. They were everything we could’ve hoped for. Behind bandstands monogrammed “RK,” the ruffle-shirted, heavy set machinists and bricklayers played everything from Polkas to “Proud Mary.” And Roland and the boys were good enough to let Pick—a versatile showman, indeed—sing a few numbers while my sister Beverle sat in on drums.

We ate and drank and danced until well after sundown. We told each other it was the best day of our lives.

And it was the best day of our lives, at least to that date. We’ve been fortunate to have had even better days since. Of course, there were some pretty awful days. And times when we’ve barely held our marriage together by a thread.

Beth’s sister Bev drummed and our friend Pick crooned. Photo: Rick Amodt.

Marrying Beth remains the single best thing I’ve ever done for myself. And I’m elated that both of us are still ticking, together, after 36 years.

We’ve made it in no small part because of the support of our friends, family, and good–hearted strangers. Thanks.

Happy anniversary to us.

Two days ago, I walked a mile. Without falling. Or wheezing. Yahoo!

Luna picked a tough time for her first job.

I did get a little dizzy early on, but took baby steps and pushed through it. The dizzy spells have been the most troubling leftovers from my time with COVID-19. No, that’s not true. The fatigue has been the worst. I tell Beth that the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning is go to sleep. The headaches and nausea spells have almost completely subsided. I finally have my appetite back. The foggy brain comes and goes, but it’s kind of terrifying when it comes. I’m told that’s OK, that if I know I’m foggy brained, that’s a good sign.

When I was 30, I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and was under a lot of stress for a variety of reasons. I got the flu, which morphed into pneumonia, a case serious enough that back then in 1987, I started getting questions about my drug use and sex life. I had a temperature of 104 for three days, and the menu of antibiotics just bounced off me. Then one day, it broke. In all I was in the hospital seven days. Gus was a year old, and family members had, thank goodness, come down to help. It took some time to get back to speed.

This COVID 19 episode was worse. Much worse.

Reports from friends who also have had the virus, along with news pieces I’ve read, indicate that my long road back to wholeness is relatively common. But the menu of misery visited on the infected takes a demonic variety of forms.

Also clear is that we still don’t really know a lot about the virus, the likelihood of it mutating, if (likely) and how long (who knows?) I’ll have any immunity.

I’ve applied to be a plasma donor—scientists are experimenting with infusions of blood that have antibodies in sick people, plus they want blood from people who’ve been infected to study in general. Waiting to hear if I make the grade.

I’m also going to donate what money and time I can to critical political races.

If the verdict on immunity is I likely have it, I’ll be working the polls come November.

Meantime, I have a lot to live for. Being cooped up with Beth has been a joy after being cooped up in the hospital. We watch TCM and Two-and-a-Half-Men reruns and Trevor Noah and last night “Last Dance,” which was a helluva a lot of fun. I cooked for the first time in weeks and remembered why I love it. After years of not having a drop of any kind of soda, I’m ingesting full-sugar Coke like it’s…coke. (Don’t tell the president–he’ll start touting it as a cure.) There’s a 7-11 downstairs when I run out, and I have a lot of masks and gloves. Printers Row Wine Shop is open! And if smarter heads do prevail, we’ll eventually be able to visit our son Gus in his group home again, safely.

Most of all, I’m gonna live healthy. (Well, mostly.) I’ve got a lot to do.

Every night at 8 pm, our neighborhood has a social distancing party. Saturday’s was an especially good party–it was Mike’s first.

Two weeks ago today Mike was admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago with the COVID 19 virus. Here are some things that happened at home while he was away:

• When I let my friend Jamie (yes, the same Jamie who was driving me to school visits before the pandemic hit) know, she rallies her book club and some old college friends to help.
• Each would choose a night and charge a meal for me at one of our small Printers Row restaurants taking to-go orders now (ordering directly means restaurants do not have to share proceeds with delivery companies).
• Neighborhood friends volunteer to pick up my dinners and deliver them to our condo
• I eat well.
• “It takes a village,” I text to one of those local volunteers to thank her for delivering a meal to me one night.
• ”And ours is a good village!” she texts back.
• I miss Mike.
• I get hooked on audio books by Irish author Maeve Binchy. The sweet lilting accents carry me far away, stories are playful. Kind of like Louise Penny books, but they take place in Dublin rather than Three Pines. And no one dies.
• Becoming more adept at using VoiceOver (the speech synthesizer that comes with every iPhone) to text and answer the phone when Mike calls, or when caring doctors, social workers, friends and family contact me to see how he’s doing.
• My part-time job moderating the blog for Easterseals National Headquarters (located in Chicago) continues, I am grateful, working from home, and, while distracted, I do what I can to devote my thinking brain to that work.
• I miss Mike.
• I set an alarm for 2:30 pm every day to listen to our governor and Illinois Department of Public Health Director give their daily update. Their honest and intelligent talks are comforting, and every once in a while the fabulous Mayor Lightfoot speaks at these, too.
• I miss Mike.
• Every night my longtime friend who is a doctor checks in with me, or I check in with her. She is working at one of the COVID testing sites and has sequestered herself from her family. Her COVID information helps me understand what Mike and I might be facing, and her friendship is sustaining.
• I join the 21st century and start carrying my iPhone wherever I go.
• Finish Quentins by Maeve Binchy. Starting her book Evening Class now.
• A box of treats — and a bottle of white wine! — arrives by UPS from my friend Jill, owner of the sensational cheese shop Marché” in Glen Ellyn.
• That’s when my nightly ritual begins: I pour a small glass of that wine every night at 8 p.m., open the window, get comfortable on the couch, nosh on Marché snacks and sip wine while listening to the nightly sing-along going on outside
• Somehow the days fly by.
• A box of unused masks and disposable gloves arrives here from my great-niece in Minneapolis, who took care of her mom (my niece Lynne), who was in hospice last year. The unused disposable gloves and masks were left over from that sad time — a bittersweet — yet extremely thoughtful and helpful — package
• Mike usually takes my Seeing Eye dog Luna out for her last “empty” of the day. Now I don a mask and disposable gloves every time I take her out, and, assuming bad guys are staying home during the pandemic, I am fearless when out with Luna after dark.
• Without being able to see, Unless people talk — or walk — loudly, it can be difficult to judge what six feet is. Luna and I do our best.
• When I hear the “ding” that tells me an elevator has arrived, I point that way, command “forward! And Luna leads me to the opening. “Anybody in here?” I ask. Not sure if the elevators here are even six feet wide, so if someone answers, I urge them to go ahead without us: I’m not pressed for time!
• Discovery: when wearing plastic disposable gloves, you can still feel the Braille dots in the elevator.
• I finish Evening Class by Maeve Binchy. On to her novel Heart and Soul.
• I miss Mike.
• Day 7 of Mike’s hospital stay, and Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens contacts us to see if Mike and I would be willing to do phone interviews with her. ” I do think your story is a really important one to get in front of readers,” she writes, adding that she thinks it illustrates the complexities that this virus presents for different families. “It also emphasizes how problematic it is that testing is sometimes hard to find and the results take so long to get back, leaving families in limbo.”
• We both are willing.
• Heidi interviews Mike in his hospital room that morning by phone.
• I am interviewed separately by phone at home.
• Photographers not allowed in hospital, so Tribune photographer comes to Printers Row, meets me outside to follow Luna and me on her afternoon “empty” walk.
• Heidi works fast. Her column about Mike is published by 5:30 pm that same afternoon.
• I miss Mike.
• In our evening phone call that night, Mike and I marvel at how Heidi Stevens does it: the column is beautifully written, accurate, and touching.
• Word is out now. Mike is in the hospital with COVID 19, and I am home alone with Luna.
• I miss Mike.
• Okay, enough of those Irish books. I start Kill “em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by writer, musician, and national Book Award winner James McBride — he grew up near James Brown, and the book is fun to read. Now reading Slam by Nick Hornby
• In her column, Heidi referred to Jamie’s dinner delivery group as my “meal train,” and friends, family and memoir-writing students near and far start asking me if they can hop on board.
• “Sure!” I respond, suggesting they buy gift cards in my name at local restaurants.
• Many of them do. Thank you all!
• I grant Jamie’s group a furlough from the meal train and start phoning local restaurants who’ve received those gift cards to order my meals.
• Neighborhood volunteers continue picking up and delivering those meals to our condo, and, I think, appreciate the opportunity to check in at the restaurant to-go windows and see how their friends on staff are doing.
• I continue eating well.
• I miss Mike,
• I start ending my email and text responses to all the friends and family members who contact me after reading the Heidi Stevens column asking that, “If you pray, please pray for us. If you think, send good thoughts our way.”
• They do.
• It starts working. Mike getting better
• So it dawns on me. Yes, Mike has been away for two weeks now, but I haven’t been here alone at all: all these people thinking about us reminds me. I’m one of the luckiest people I know
• Over the weekend, Mike is discharged after three-day hotel stay. Clear of COVID 19, he can come home.
• He does.
• We hug.

If you missed it, grab a Kleenex and read this beautiful post Mike wrote about his experiences for his Mondays with Mike column earlier this week

Over the 15-plus years I’ve been leading memoir classes in Chicago many many people have suggested I offer an online course as well. “You’d get people from all over the country,” they say. “You could charge a lot, and you wouldn’t even have to leave home.”Not leave home? Being with my writers is what I love most about teaching memoir. Hearing Wanda’s classmates scramble to find her a seat when she arrives; sensing the drama of passing a bag of Scrabble tiles around to determine who picks “Z” out of the bag (usually “A” goes first, but sometimes I go backwards!); Bindy’s delight to hear an assignment that inspires a limerick; Janie reading an essay out loud for a fellow writer whose low vision prevents them from doing so on their own; the collective gasp when Bruce recites a particularly poignant phrase; hearing updates on our new Grail Café from writers who stopped there before coming to the class I lead in the neighborhood; taking in the ooos and ahs whenever Michael brings a show and tell to passs around as he reads his latest essay.

“Being right there to sense writers reading their stories in their own voices, watching how trust grows in a group of people who share life stories…to me that’s the most important part of what I do,” I tell the online pushers. “Eavesdropping before and after class tells me a lot, too, and you just can’t eavesdrop like that online.” I thank the friends for the online class idea. “But it just won’t work for me.”

Those online pushers are a determined bunch.

They power on, describe a site or program or app or whatever it is you call it where you can see everyone’s face on the screen. “You can see everyone there and watch their reactions right from home,” they reason.

“But I can’t see!” I remind them. That’s usually where The conversation ends.

Writers join the memoir-writing classes I lead for all sorts of reasons. Some want to hone their writing skills, some hope it will improve their memory, others want to collect their essays as a gift to their relatives. Some like the weekly deadline, some hope to get their essays published, others count on sharing time every week with a group who likes to hear –and share — their life stories. This post written by Dr. Jeremy Nobel in the Harvard Health Blog presents scientific data supporting a benefit many writers don’t anticipate when they first sign up: the idea that writing and sharing stories about your life can be “even lifesaving in a world where loneliness — and the ill health it can lead to — has become an epidemic.” From his blog:

Picking up a pen can be a powerful intervention against loneliness. I am a strong believer in writing as a way for people who are feeling lonely and isolated to define, shape, and exchange their personal stories. Expressive writing, especially when shared, helps foster social connections. It can reduce the burden of loneliness among the many groups who are most at risk, including older adults, caregivers, those with major illnesses, those with disabilities, veterans, young adults, minority communities of all sorts, and immigrants and refugees.

Dr. Nobel did not specify in his blog whether the sharing had to be done in person to fight loneliness, or if sharing online would work just as well.

When it was determined that the Thursday afternoon Village Chicago class would not be meeting in person for their fifth and sixth classes of this session, I decided to try an experiment: send an email with their prompt, assure them I’d still edit essays for anyone who wanted to send their assignments my way, then encourage them to “reply to all” and email their completed essays (whether edited by me or not, that didn’t matter) to their fellow writers to read at their leisure. I would email my comments to every writer who sent an essay, and Comments from their classmates would come to them via email, too rather than in person. I made it clear that students were not required to read the essays they received via email, but I encouraged them to do so and respond to help us keep in touch while classes were cancelled. Results?

• During week one, 20% of the writers sent essays to their fellow writers via email, and 6.66% of writers emailed their classmates with a comment.
• During week two, our final class of this six-week session, 6.666% of the writers sent essays to their fellow writers via email, and 0% emailed that classmate with a comment.

I know, I know. This is just a personal non-evidence-based very short experiment, and maybe it’d work if I used one of those apps, but really, I’m too busy washing my hands and spraying the knobs on the radio to learn how to download one right now. So I’m sticking to my guns. If I’m the one teaching, it’s gotta be in person.

Or so I thought.

I’ve mentioned Wanda Bridgeforth, our 98-year-old memoir matriarch, in this post and want you blog readers to know she is doing well. “I am not really affected,” she told me during one of our phone calls these past few weeks. “I stay home most of the time anyway!”

For the past three years, Wanda has been participating in the University of Chicago Medical Center’s Comprehensive Care, Community, and Culture Program and receives a personal phone call every three months to ask about her health and the quality of care she has been receiving. “But this past week it was different,” she told me over the weekend, marveling at how the doctor who called this time managed to be on the phone with all the study participants at once. “He could answer all our questions about the coronavirus and all that, they had 15 of us all on the phone line at once!”

I had questions. Could everyone on the phone actually hear each other? Wasn’t it scratchy? Was everyone polite? Didn’t people interrupt each other? “Oh, no, it was great! All very clear,” she assured me. “So listen, okay with you if I make some phone calls Monday morning, you know, to se how that works and if we can set something like this up for our class?”

Of course I said yes!

Back in the 1980s, between Beth’s eyes and Gus’ genetic predicament, our little family used a lot of health care. We had insurance, thank goodness, but we still ended up with substantial debt that took years to resolve. In our 20s then, we’d learned early what it’s like to structure our lives around the top priority: Remaining insured.

So I was a big single-payer advocate back then. On moral grounds, yes, because I think everyone should have confidence that they’ll receive decent health care, and they shouldn’t live in fear of not having insurance. But from a capitalist’s point of view, I also think the case for single payer is also strong. Because, while some folks are calling it socialist, you don’t have to be an economist to see we are wasting enormous sums of money on inefficiencies inherent in our splintered mess. That’s a lot of money that could be used differently. Like, oh, infrastructure, private investment, you know, all that stuff. (A recent study supports the argument of prospective overall savings, though, like all such things, there are doubters.)

But then, there’s the rub. No matter how I feel about it, the insurance industry and the health care industry are enormous. That’s reality, however we got here. And they employ a lot of people. Even if the political will materializes, the task of managing and coordinating the switchover is fraught.

And that’s why I no longer support single-payer, at least in the short run. I do support universal coverage. And those are two different things.

Most countries that offer universal coverage do not rely on single payer. They rely on fairly heavily regulated insurance industries. I’m talking about the cool-cat European joints that American liberals regularly point to as good examples.

We have an enormous and inefficient health care machine that includes a giant private insurance industry. To me, that points to moving toward a West European model—Switzerland, Germany, etc.—choosing what works from all of them. To me, that looks doable. It wouldn’t upend an enormous industry, at least not in the short run—and if it includes a public option, it could also be an avenue for gradual and orderly transition to single payer without economic calamity. People could gradually migrate on their own to the public option, and not be yanked out of whatever they have now.

On the other hand, flipping a switch and shazaam! Single payer! That seems impractical, a potential nightmare. (Anyone remember the Obamacare web markets rollout?) This isn’t like Medicare, where it was a from-scratch deal. It was new, not “instead of.”

Which brings me to Bernie Sanders and at least some of his followers. To that contingent, I’m a centrist sellout. To them, there is only ONE WAY, which reeks of a sort of progressive fundamentalism. And at times, an air of moral superiority. There is no acknowledgment that we both want universal coverage, and that’s a very large common ground. There is no acknowledgement of my experience — with the health care systems but also in various workplaces — informing my view.

As for Bernie, he seems to bristle when asked for mechanical details. And he doesn’t have any proxies out there supplying those details either. At least in a way that gives me confidence. He does have true belief—and as I said, in theory, I agree. If he exhibited some awareness of the practicalities of his plan, and how to address them, I might get on board.

In practice, that certitude he exhibits scares me. I suppose it’s exactly what appeals to some of his supporters. To me that certitude is, in itself, a disqualification. Because it seems to be his standard operating procedure.

But I have other bones to pick with him, and for want of another term, Bernieism. One is the long-running bull about the Democratic party sabotaging him. Ask yourself this: Why, when he eschewed the Democratic Party his entire career, regularly dumped on it, did he decide to run as a Democrat? Why put up with all those people you say are hacks? Why not a new party?

Because, well, he gets a ton of benefits. Like mailing lists and infrastructure and all that, you know, practical stuff. Infrastructure that all those people he and his supporters revile so much worked hard to build and maintain. Welcome Bernie! We’re glad to have someone who likes to urinate on us!

And don’t get me started on his hypocrisy regarding delegates and superdelegates. He’s completely flipped from his 2016 position. (Thanks, Elizabeth Warren, for calling that out.)

Will I vote for him if he’s the nominee? As early and often as I am able.

But I’ll have to hold my nose. And if you are a Sanders supporter, and it doesn’t turn out the way you’d like, I hope you’ll do the same.