Two days ago our friend Ruth drove my Seeing Eye dog Luna and me to the Admiral At the Lake, a retirement community where I lead memoir-writing classes every Wednesday. I wasn’t there this time to lead a writing class, though: we were there to answer questions from third-graders who attend Goudy Elementary, a Public school for children of immigrants that is located near the Admiral in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

My group’s graduation picture from the January class, 2020. I’m so lucky I got matched with Luna before the pandemic.

The third graders are part of a Friday “reading buddies” program at The Admiral, and on certain Fridays the third grade teachers and their students walk from Goudy Elementary to the Admiral so each third-grader can read out loud to an assigned Admiral resident, their “reading buddy.”

Luna and I were invited there last Friday because the third-graders had all read my children’s book “Safe & Sound” and they wanted to meet me. I gave a short presentation to explain how Luna had to go to the Seeing Eye School to learn to lead me around safely, and each child was encouraged to ask me a question when it was their turn.

Every single child told me their name, then introduced their question a la, “Hello, my name is Sunil, and here’s my question…”. I made a point to repeat each question so the Reading Buddies in the audience could hear them, too. Some examples:

-How do you know what you are wearing?
-How does your dog know where he’s going?
-Is there one place you go with your dog every day?
-Did any dog inspire Luna to help you?
-How do you lock the door?
-How do you come up with ideas of what to write?
-How old is your dog?
-How do you cook?
-How do you find the doorknob?
-How old are you?
-Did anything scary ever happen to you when you were with your dog?
-How do you grab things? How do you find them?
-You said you had five Seeing Eye dogs – which one is your favorite?

Dora, Hanni, Harper, Whitney…you’d think it’d be hard to choose, but for me this question is easy to answer. “Whichever dog is working with me right now is always my favorite,” I told them.

“So right now Luna is my favorite.”

The kids really were very, very well-behaved. The afternoon was delightful, everyone had a chance to participate and our interaction wasn’t limited to the most vocal in the group. Each one got a turn to ask their question.

Their reward? I took Luna’s harness off and invited them to pet her when it came time to head outside and walk back to Goudy Elementary. The Admiral had provided cookies for everyone, and the kids saw to it that our friend Ruth got a few on her way out. Everybody won!

Maybe it’s just people of my age who are seeing these things, but there seems to be a spurt of TV ads for various prescription drugs that are mini-musicals. This one, for Jardiance, is probably the most musical-like of these jaunty ads:

Jardiance is one of those drugs for type 2 diabetics that is also being used for weight loss. There must be something about lowering one’s A1C (at test that produces a measure of blood sugar control over time) that really makes people want to get up and dance—for Ozempic ads set characters in motion to some pretty annoying ear-worm music:

On one hand, it’s kind of cool that A1C knowledge is going mainstream—I first learned about it when Beth and I started going out decades ago. Back then it was newish and kind of a novelty and had we mentioned it to friends, we would’ve been greeted by blank stares.

On the other hand, I can’t help but see an incongruity between a serious, chronic condition and the urge to get up and dance. (Some non-prescription drugs, maybe.) I kinda feel like Eli Lilly strikes a more appropriate tone with its ad for its type 2 drug Mounjaro.

Apart from wondering what the meetings about naming these drugs must have been like, I can’t help but also wonder how much they cost to produce, and worse yet, the ad spends these companies make to get them on screens so often. In addition, they all tout their weight loss potential, and you just know that we’re eventually going to learn about how that’s a bad idea (that is, taking it expressly for weight loss and not type 2 diabetes) long after the horse is out of the barn.

In a pretty wealthy nation where lots of people have no health care (save for emergency room visits) or inadequate care and bad insurance coverage, the song and dance is hard to stomach.

Last week I bought myself a post-Christmas gift (although, not post-Christmas by the Orthodox calendar—for my extended Knezovich family, Christmas was yesterday, January 7). I don’t have it yet—Abt (a Chicago area retailer that sells appliances, furniture, electronics—you name it) delivers and installs my new toy this Friday. And I’m on pins and needles—can’t wait to give it a spin.

Vroom-Vroom!

What is this new toy? It’s an induction range. Yep, that’s where I am these days. There was a day when it was motorcycles and drugs and rock-an-roll. Now, it’s a high-tech electric range.

If you don’t know what induction cooking is, think of an electric stovetop on steroids. Each element gets hot faster than a gas stove, and it cools faster. More precisely, these things use magnetism to heat the pot or pan—the element doesn’t heat up, per se, though it does get warm to hot because of contact with the heated cookware.

I’ve known about these things for along while. My work at Phius puts me in contact with cool, energy-efficient technologies and the cool people who build passive house residences typically go whole-hog with efficiency and install induction stoves and combination cooktop/ovens. (The oven parts are conventional electric.)

I’ve got the combination cooktop/oven coming Friday and I actually am kinda juiced to try it. Because the cookware has to be magnetic, I’m losing use of a saucepan and a couple other pieces of cookware. But that’s an excuse for getting a new ones.

I’ve missed cooking on a gas stove—our Printers Row building doesn’t have gas service. Especially when it comes to stir frying or pressure cooking, where you want to be able to get something really hot really fast, and conversely, to turn down the heat quickly. All without any fossil fuel combustion or its byproducts.

I still wouldn’t mind a motorcycle, though.

A happy 2024 to you all, and thanks for stopping by.

I am not doing Dry-uary but I wholly support all who are. Me, I may drink more because you know, it’s an election year. Numbing is in order.

Our holiday season starts in earnest on December 23, Beth’s birthday. We went to Hamilton, and then to dinner at a funky, delightful place called Rootstock in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Our friend Val, who works across the street from our apartment at Printers Row Wine Shop, works Saturday nights at Rootstock, which aligned very nicely on December 23. She and the owner took great care of us and our friend Ruth. Beth’s birthday was just about perfect.

The next morning things went off the rails a bit: Beth awoke in the 5 o’clock a.m. hour, as she always does, to feed Luna. And, as she always does, Beth took her morning medications. One of those meds, a pesky little time-release capsule, decided not to go down all the way. Heimlich maneuvers, water, calisthenics—nothing worked. She never had trouble breathing, thank God, but the dang thing just sat there and burned in her throat.

She finally dozed off and when she awoke, the pill seemed to have dissolved but the irritation was front and center. This is already TMI but I’ll fast forward and say that a week after her birthday and one visit to an urgent care, we spent 11 hours at the emergency room and left with a prescription for two medications and not a whole lot of instant gratification.

But, as of this writing, those two meds seem to be a good idea and Beth is feeling better than she has for over a week and once we get some more sugar-free pudding in her we’ll be off to the races. (She couldn’t eat this past week because it was so hard to swallow.)

OK, let me say that I feel wholly lucky that we have wonderful friends and health insurance. That the nurses and doctors at Northwestern were fantastic, as were the intake folks and other staff. But, I must also say what I’ve been saying since my twenties and we were navigating the health care system because of Beth’s eyes and Gus’ many maladies—“system” is the biggest freaking euphemism since Reagan coined the term “peacekeeper” for a nuclear missile.

I’ll stop there for fear of starting 2024 on the wrong foot. The bottom line is we’re fortunate, Beth is feeling better, and we’re both exhausted.

In a period when Beth was out of bed and on the couch, we watched an absolutely fantastic documentary on Netflix called “American Symphony.” The foundation of the story told is the process that the multitalented Jon Batiste followed in writing a symphony. That part of it is powerful—watching him collaborate to create an unconventional orchestra to play an unconventional piece of music is fascinating and gives shape to the ephemeral term “creativity.”

The documentary would be good if that’s all it did—but the whole process is spliced with Batiste’s complicated personal situation—that being his girlfriend-eventually-wife being treated for a relapse of leukemia. It’s one of those experiences that’s real, heartbreaking and inspirational all at once.

Finally, I invite your help in helping Beth and me solve a mystery. Sometime around her birthday we got notice from our building that a package was waiting at the desk. It turned out to be a big box, and our door person, who’s seen the two of us through various maladies over the years, put it on a hand truck and brought it to our place. (We love you Chauncey!)

It turned out to be a case of rosé wine from Argentina. It’s called Rule of 3, it’s made from Malbec, and it’s delicious.

The problem? The card that came with it said only, “Merry Christmas!” No name, no hint at who gave us the lovely gift.

So, if you are the generous, thoughtful soul who sent it and have been wondering whether we got it, we did and thank you! And please, raise your hand!

Here’s to a safe, healthy, and peaceful 2024. A man can dream.

Beth models her gifts–bracelets made by her 9-year-old great niece.

Forty years ago this coming Sunday, December 24, Beth and I got in my junky Pontiac Ventura and headed north from Beth’s house on California Street in Urbana, to Beth’s mother Flo’s house on Colfax in Elmhurst, Illinois—a suburb west of Chicago.

Phew, if I only known what was coming. To start, the temperature (not wind chill mind you) reached minus 20 Fahrenheit that night. (The wind chill reached well below -60 overnight.) The advertising slogan for my Pontiac when it was new was, “It’s a prestige car. It’s an economy car.” Kind of like that Saturday Night Live skit that touted a fake product as “A desert topping…no, it’s a floor wax!,” my Pontiac was neither economical nor prestigious.

But it did start. What it didn’t do was warm up. The temperature gauge wouldn’t budge and, even set to its warmest setting, the heater fan blew cold air. Enter a big piece of cardboard and a bungee cord, and I blocked the radiator from the cold air so the engine reached proper operating temperature, and Beth and I remained reasonably comfortable.

Out of towners could skip treacherous drives and teleport in.

The wind was howling and visibility was bad but we motored on. When I stopped for gas it was like an arctic landscape and it felt like an act of survival to just get out, get the pump started, and fill the tank. I imagined being found next to the pump with icicles hanging off my beard, the way they find unlucky Mt. Everest climbers.

We made it that night. As did Beth’s sisters and their families from points around the United States. It was my first full blown introduction to the full complement of the Finke family, which I came to call Finke Nation. I grew up with one sister, so Beth’s mom’s living room looked like Beijing, China that night. Beth and I slept under the dining room table. Snoozing kids were strewn across the living room carpet.

The next day I participated in my first homemade Christmas. Beth’s family, being as prodigious as it was (and is), concluded that gift giving would bankrupt everyone and decided to do a drawing. Whoever’s name you draw, you make a gift for. (This being Chicago, there have been known to be shenanigans around these drawings.)

Back then, the soft rule was that it couldn’t cost more than $5. But whatever, the main thing was you had to make it.

I don’t remember much clearly about that day. I recall being drafted into being Santa. Other than that, children skittered everywhere and, well, it was all a little overwhelming.

Yesterday, I attended my 40^th homemade Christmas. It was hosted by Beth’s nephew and his wife Julie. Ben was maybe 13 back at my first one in 1983. He and Julie have four kids. And a lot of those skittering kids from Flo’s living room have kids of their own.

There’s always plenty to eat.

This year’s event was well-attended, and it included Zoomers from Florida and Minnesota and a hospital room in Kentucky (not to worry, patient is unbreakable). I mean, you can only drive through blizzards so many times in a lifetime, and Zoom worked fine.

What I didn’t know back in year one of homemade Christmas about Beth’s and my future was as massive and dense as a black hole. For everything that’s happened, this homemade tradition—one that I’ve groused about (and I think everyone else has, too) at times—has been a lovely constant.

Thank you Finke Nation.