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.

The Museum of Science and Industry is the backdrop for the Jackson Park Lagoon. The Museum and the Japanese garden are pretty much the only remnants of 1893’s Columbian Expedition.

You can live in a big city for years and miss some of its gems. We’ve been in Chicago since 2003 and somehow, we’d never been to the Japanese Garden—The Garden of the Phoenix. Until this past Sunday, that is, when we climbed in the back seat of our friend’s sedan for a little urban adventure. The Garden is tucked away in Chicago’s Jackson Park, just a few miles south of our Printers Row neighborhood

A word about Jackson Park: Magnificent. It’s a Frederick Law Olmsted-Calvert Vaux (those Central Park guys) design, 552 acres of lush vegetation, trails, lagoons, birds—a beautiful oasis that has been part of South Side life for generations. Chicago’s North Siders are the worse for not venturing down to Jackson Park—it’s in the shadow of the Museum of Science and Industry and a quick hop from The University of Chicago. It’s worth an afternoon with or without a visit to the Garden of the Phoenix.

The ducks and koi live in peace.

Back to the Japanese garden: It’s been there (mostly) since 1893. Japan gifted it to Chicago for thestoried Columbian Exhibition (of The Devil in the White City fame), but it’s had a craggy history since then. It remained intact after the Columbian Exhibition, even after a fire destroyed most other Exhibition buildings. Over the years it fell in and out of disrepair. The worst of it came when it was vandalized after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. (The more things change….) It actually disappeared for all practical purposes during the 1950s, but in 1981, the garden was replanted and rededicated after Chicago and Osaka became sister cities.

Learn all about Yoko Ono’s Skylanding.

Today it’s a perfectly manicured respite from the city’s concrete jungle, complete with colorful Koi and the sounds of a waterfall. And, just outside the perimeter of the Garden of the Phoenix, you’ll find a fascinating piece of sculpture called Sky Landing. Dedicated in 2016,  Yoko Ono was the sculptor, and it was inspired by the lotus flower. It’s meant to be healing, and after having experienced it, I think she hit the mark.

Chicago peeps, check it out if you haven’t. For you visitors (now that it looks like you may be able to visit), add it to your list of things to do.

Photo of then-new Seeing Eye dog Luna’s first and last in-person school visits in early March, 2020, before you-know-what happened.

During our disability awareness presentations, one thing I like to get across to the school kids is that people with disabilities enjoy — and engage in — a lot of the same things they do. We just develop different skills (and sometimes use different “helping tools”) to achieve our goals.

Two days ago Luna and I did what will likely be our last Zoom presentation for 3rd graders this school year. Our presentation was scheduled for late morning, and the weather was so beautiful in Chicago Tuesday that a dear neighbor invited me to come swim laps at his condominium’s outdoor pool around noon.

Could I make it to my friend’s pool on time? Well, yes. As long as I wore my brand new polka-dotted swimsuit to the presentation. The 3rd graders would only see my head and shoulders on Zoom, right?

My Zoom talk that morning opened with my big announcement: this was the first time I’d ever worn a swimsuit to a school presentation. The kids were all muted, and without being able to see them, I chose to believe they found that absolutely hillarious. “Right after this presentation is over, I’m going swimming outside!”

My mentioning swimsuits and swimming provided an instant connection between me and these very bright eight- and nine-year-olds. Some of their questions:

• How long have you been swimming?
  • What was your favorite activity when you could see, and what is your favorite activity now?
  • Where’d you learn to swim?
  • How can you Zoom if you can’t see?
  • How can you drive?
  • How many Seeing Eye dogs have you had?
  • Did any of your dog’s ever bite someone?
  • Have any of your dog’s gotten sick?
  • Did you ever use a stick?
  • How many books have you wrote?
  • Are you writing any books now?
  • did you write those books when you were blind, or did you write them all when you were like us and still in school and you could see?
  • Did you have to learn a lot of new things after you were blind?
  • How many years have you been blind?
  • How many years have you been swimming?

Doing Zoom presentations from the comforts of home has its benefits: no need to arrange for rides to faraway suburban schools, don’t have to wake up early, it’s okay to dress casual, you don’t have to pack up your “helping tools” to bring along, Zooming takes less time, allowing the Zoomer to fit more things into their day. Like Swimming laps outside.

And yet.

I still prefer being in the room with the kids I’m visiting. I miss hearing their oohs and ahs when my Seeing Eye dog leads me into their classroom, the murmur of questions they ask even before the presentation begins, hearing “me! Me! Me!” when they hold up their hands to ask questions afterwards, and, especially, the joy they express when I take Luna’s harness off afterwards and let them pet her. I’m holding out hope that at least some of the visits to schools next year will be in person, but who knows? Maybe the schools will decide sponsoring Zoom meetings for authors is easier for them. Like so many other issues during these pre-post-pandemic times, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Or wait and hear!