We visited some friends in Urbana the week before last—at some point, as we talked about our home town and its problems, one asked, “Do you know people who have actually moved away?”

We do.

It started with a liquor store….

One couple left after the second round of looting last summer. Two other couples probably were on their way out anyway—they’re both planning for a second child and there really aren’t a lot of units in our hood with more than two smallish bedrooms. For others who might have been contemplating a move, this last year’s troubles simply overcame inertia—and they left.

The city is coming back. We’ve been to live music, and we look forward to live theater—those two things are sustaining and we missed them terribly.

But the problems aren’t going away. It’s not easy reading about shooting deaths every day, and it’s flat out scary sometimes. I’ll confess, this last year did have me thinking, for the first time since we moved here in 2003, about moving elsewhere.

It can feel like moving is the only thing we can do. But I was reminded last week that it’s not—by of all people, sports talk hosts at WSCR am, our local all-sports, all the time radio station.

Here’s how it came to be. Sam Acho is a former Chicago Bears player who helped found Athletes for Justice. I’ve heard him talk about the organization many times and he’s an absolute prince and Athletes for Justice does marvelous work in Chicagoland.

One project began last year after last summer’s looting left a former liquor store hollowed out and out of business. The organization raised funds to buy it and make it a popup store for fresh, healthy foods. The store’s called Austin Harvest, named for its West Side neighborhood. Austin is a community that suffers for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it’s in a vast food desert.

The store is operated by a local organization called By the Hand, a club for local kids. Austin Harvest didn’t just bring fresh, health food to Austin—it employs and trains local kids.

When the sports station people heard that Acho and his org wanted  to help build a permanent grocery store there, one of the hosts-Danny Parkins—suggested an old-fashioned 24-hour radiothon to raise money for the effort. Parkins stayed up and on the air for 24 straight hours. Of course, he had help—guest interviews with people involved with the project, prerecorded interviews with kids who work at the store and local residents. No sports, just a lot of inspiration.

He called it the “What about Chicago?” Radiothon as a sort of FU to the people who ask that question in the wrong spirit.

And it raised, at last count, over $700,000.

Of course, they’ll need still more—but it’s a helluva start.

You can donate to the effort via WSCR’s site.

Or go to Athletes for Justice.

And you can support all the programs By the Hand operates.

I hope you will.

It’s been a tough year for my city, but I want to see Chicago roar back to life. And to tell the truth, when it comes down to it, I just can’t imagine being anywhere else.

Today I went in for my annual chest MRI. It’s annual because way back when I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. When I was scheduled for a procedure called an ablation, pre-procedure imaging showed that my aorta was on the large size. My cardiologist said it might be nothing—I might just be a big-aorta guy. But, to be safe, every year I get this MRI to make sure nothing is changing.

The wacky aorta looks like a…I don’t know.

Each time I lay down on the big MRI tray, I’m more or less immobilized by straps, the tray moves into a tube, and a psychedelic sound show begins. Again and again I’m asked to inhale and hold my breath for short spurts, and a couple of times I’m told to hold it for 60 seconds or as long as I can. Then they squirt some dye/contrast agent through an IV and we repeat. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic, because the first couple of MRIs took around 90 minutes each—that’s a long time if you are claustrophobic (or if your nose itches–don’t ask me how I know).

Not today, though. My technician opened by saying if I’d meet him halfway, he could do it in as little as 35 minutes. This was a novelty–I’ve never negotiated with a medical technician. So, I bit: “What do I have to do?”

“If you’re willing to skip the music, and you don’t mind doing the breath commands kind of fast, I can get you out in around a half hour,” the tech said.

“Deal!” I mean, the only thing weirder than the clanks and sci-fi shrieks of an MRI is an overlay of music that doesn’t mask so much as it adds to the cacophony.

In the past, the technician would call out instructions about when to breathe in and out, but today the tech programmed the whole thing, and an automated voice makes the breathing commands. It all went like clockwork. When he pulled me out of the tube and unstrapped me, he was giddy. “Thirty minutes on the nose,” he said. “My previous record was 32 minutes. You’re awesome.”

These are the kind of things one is proud of when one reaches a certain age. I destroyed my MRI tech’s previous personal best. If there’s anyone who’s good at being still and breathing, I’m him.

I’m also very lucky. I have good health insurance. I have a great cardiologist (the same one who helped save Beth’s life lo these many years ago). I have a great primary care doctor who’s a careful gatekeeper, and who helped shepherd me through my COVID scare.

And, despite some nagging-but-treatable little maladies, I’m fundamentally healthy, despite a lifetime of various vices, decades of motorcycling, and some really dumb decisions in my youth.

Not everyone, including way too many of our friends, are as lucky as I have been. In the last year or two, four people we love have been diagnosed and are under treatment for very serious forms of cancer. Another, heartbreakingly, is beginning to experience the effects of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. And on, and on.

You want to do something to help so bad. And sometimes you feel powerless.

But we’ve learned that the one thing you can do is be there: listen, ask questions when it makes sense to ask questions, and more than anything, enjoy each other like you always have.

Only do it like there’s no tomorrow.

This past Sunday morning our book club met in-person for the first time since you-know-what. It happened to be my turn to host, many of our members are Jewish, so to celebrate I baked a loaf of challah.

Illustration By Anthony Letourneau from “Hanni & Beth, Safe & Sound.” .

I learned to bake bread shortly after losing my sight. We lived in central Illinois, I was out of work and hungry for new opportunities. When I heard of a local charity looking for volunteers for its annual phonathon, I signed up.

After enlisting another volunteer to read names and phone numbers onto a tape recorder, I listened to the cassette, punched the numbers onto the phone’s keypad and raised money with the best of ’em. We volunteers were so busy that night that we never got around to eating the treats provided for us.

Treats? What treats? Unable to see, I had no idea of any treats there!

“Anyone want to take some of this food home?” Never shy when it comes to free food, I raised my hand. An untouched loaf of homemade bread was placed into my backpack, and when I unveiled it at home, it smelled sweet. My blindness is due to Type 1 diabetes; I stay away from anything too sugary. Mike doesn’t like anything with nuts in it, and the loaf was loaded with both.

“Take it to work tomorrow,” I suggested. He’d just started a job at the University of Illinois, his colleagues there hadn’t met me yet, and I wanted to impress them. “Tell your co-workers I made it myself,” I told Mike.

Ah, what a tangled web we weave. The coworkers loved the bread. They wanted me to make more. One even asked if she could come over and watch me so she could try it herself at home.

Uh-oh. What to do? admit my lie? Or learn to bake bread? I chose the latter.

When I called the charity the next morning to ask who’d provided the bread the night of the phonathon, the volunteer organizer was ready with an answer. . “If it was homemade bread, it had to be Charlie,” she said. “You know Charlie, he’s the pastor at the Presbyterian church.”

A pastor made the bread? Holy crap! Lucky for me, Charlie was a pastor with a sense of humor. When I called the next morning to confess my sin, that I’d claimed to have baked the bread myself, he just laughed. “When would be a good time for me to come over and teach you to bake bread?”

That was over 30 years ago. At my first and only lesson with Charlie, he guided my hands through the yeast proofing, the stirring, the kneading, the braiding. I’ve been baking bread ever since — rustic Italian breads, flatbreads, beer-and-cheese bread, potato bread, wheat bread, and last Sunday, challah. No vision required. The other four senses — touch, hearing, smell, taste – are enough.

Touch is by far the most important: water should be lukewarm; dough should rise to twice its original size; knead until the dough is easy to stretch but not too sticky. Hearing comes in when you have to thump the loaf to see if it’s done. The sense of smell is not required, but who would bother to make bread from scratch if they couldn’t smell it baking?

Ditto taste. Nothing–short of tomatoes eaten right off the vine — tastes as good as a slice of bread right out of the oven.

The weather in Chicago was so beautiful Sunday that we met outside at Printers Row Park. Members helped me out by bringing their own hot drinks and camp chairs. I brought the loaf fresh from the oven, book club members had brought schmear to share, The challah was easy to eat outside, and somehow we managed to devour the entire loaf. What a delight to be together in person again enjoying simple pleasures — all hail the vaccines and the scientists who created them!

And one last note to my fellow book club members: I promise I really did make the challah myself!

This past Friday, Chicago dropped most of the pandemic restrictions. We still are required to wear masks on public transportation (something I think I may do forever) and in certain other circumstances like schools, medical facilities, etc. (All of this relaxation applies only to vaccinated people—how we can tell who’s whom, I don’t know.)

Thank goodness one of our top happy places made it.

Also last Friday, right before Beth and I were about to mask up to leave our building for a walk, I got an email from our condo building management office. Same message: Vaccinated? You don’t have to wear a mask in the building anymore. As we walked naked-faced down the hall to the elevators, a couple from across the hall emerged with their Boston Terrier.

They did a doubletake and one of them looked at us with puzzlement, “Does this mean…”. I said, yes, indeed, we’d all been released. He yanked off his mask.

Because not everyone had gotten the memo yet, we walked out the lobby to some funny looks.

I believe some of us may go on wearing masks in the building in solidarity with staff, who are still required to wear them

This past weekend became a challenge to break a habit that’d been built over the last year+. It’s going to be weird for a while. I’m keeping a mask with me—in case I need one, but at this point, it’s also a security blanket.

A couple of generous friends gave us tickets to Jazz Showcase, and the joint was jumping when we arrived. Good thing we had those tickets! The owner had to turn away quite a few walkups.

It was a relief to see our local businesses packed all weekend—inside and outside on patios. Essentially, this was the weekend they could say, “We made it.”

And it was jarring. Once you spend months developing a survival sensibility that says, “Wear masks, crowds are bad,” you can’t just turn it off.

Plus, there’s this: For those of us who wore parkas to dinner, sat next to firepits outside, and sat inside next to giant open windows in 20-degree weather, there was a tiny bit of melancholy. The hardcore regulars of these places bonded with each other and with staff and owners.

As one proprietor confided to me as we eyed a sea of filled tables: “I liked it better when there were fewer people.”

And a note about your waiters, waitresses, bartenders, and owners: These poor folks lost lots of staff who have moved on. And they’re gearing up on the fly to meet ferocious, pent-up demand. Be kind.

Of course, it’s terrific that they’re fully opened again. And I wish the pandemic had never happened.

But I, like a lot of people who I’ve talked to, am spending some time putting on the brakes a little. My calendar’s getting full, fast.

But do I want my life to be as busy as it was before all this? As, at times, frenzied?

I’m not sure.

If more people do the right thing, we can go to a game with our friends.

I went to a White Sox game Saturday—it’s my fifth visit this year and it was technically my sixth game because one of my visits was a doubleheader. The park was still limited to 60 percent plus an all-vaccinated section of the bleachers that didn’t count against the 60 percent. Unlike the first couple games, fans were allowed to roam the park freely, and were not confined to their sections.

I’ve been to the office a few times, and for the first time in a long while, I was physically with colleagues. And, our office had an outdoor party at a lovely spot called Theatre on the Lake.  It’s a working theatre with a bar/restaurant and a huge outdoor deck. I’ve never been that hot on office get-togethers, they can feel stiff and awkward and forced.

But this was an absolute riot, partly because Phius, the non-profit I work for, has essentially double its number of employees since last June. The result is that half of us had never been together in the same physical space, we’d only met on Zoom.

Overall, it’s starting to feel kind of normal again.

At least for some of us. A good friend walks this earth with two transplanted lungs and one transplanted kidney. It’s been more than 20 years since he got his lungs and he pretty much will tell you that he’s grateful for every single day of ever year. And that’s how he lives his life. But the world is not reopening for him and his wife.

The COVID vaccines have been found to have very low efficacy in solid organ transplant patients. That’s largely, it’s believed, because the miraculous immunosuppressant drugs that prevent rejection of transplanted organs also prevent transplant patients from building the antibodies that average Joes like I do when vaccinated.

So, as we lucky ones celebrate the reopening, virtually nothing has changed for our friend and his spouse. They have been advised to behave essentially as we all did during full lockdown.,

Selfishly, that really blows. We still can’t have them over for dinner, though we can see them if we take the right precautions.

For them, it’s just heartbreaking.

The vaccine has never been about protecting only one’s self. We protect others, and if we hit herd immunity, our friends can live their lives again. If you’ve been reticent to get the vaccine—or know someone who has put it off, please tell them to do it for our pals, and all the other people in their situation.