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!

Starting tomorrow, May 24, all three of the memoir-writing classes I lead will be on summer break. What fun to think of these fully-vaccinated writers visiting and hugging their grandchildren, attending outdoor concerts, visiting museums, meeting friends for coffee, heading to beaches faraway… or beaches right here on Lake Michigan. If there’s one thing we’ve all learned in the past year-and-a-half, it’s how to adapt to change! With all of them taking advantage of these new pre-post-pandemic times, I’m giving our Saturdays with Seniors feature a summer break as well.

That’s Wanda Bridgeforth and me after recording our StoryCorps conversation. The two of us are always happy to be together, can you tell? Photo courtesy StoryCorps.

One change here I was sorry to hear about is the decision by StoryCorps to permanently close the StoryBooth that’d been located here at the Chicago Cultural Center for years. Here’s an excerpt from a letter they sent me to break the news:

Dear Beth,
We’re writing to share that after eight years at the Chicago Cultural Center, this September we will be ceasing operations at the Chicago StoryBooth.

Since we first opened in 2013, StoryCorps Chicago has recorded and preserved more than 4,000 facilitated interviews, including yours.

We are grateful to the Chicago Cultural Center and DCASE; to our Chicago-based funders; to WBEZ, our local station partner, and producer Bill Healy; to the many organizations we’ve partnered with which have enabled us to preserve so many voices of Chicago; and of course, to the Chicago participants like you who have shared their stories with us..

With gratitude,
The StoryCorps Chicago Team

In the eight years that StoryCorps was located here in Chicago, three interviews I recorded in the StoryBooth aired on Chicago Public Radio. Two were conversations with writers who were in the memoir-writing classes I lead:

1. In 2017 I interviewed Giovanna Breu. a retired journalist who had a long career with Life, Giovanna had covered the funeral and burial of President John F. Kennedy for the magazine in 1962.
2. In 2019, StoryCorps recorded a conversation I had with Wanda Bridgeforth. Among many other things Wanda talked about during that interview, she outlined the boundaries she grew up with on Chicago’s South Side. “When I was a kid, if you crossed east on Cottage Grove Avenue, a policeman would come out of nowhere, ask where you were going and escort you right back across the street.”

And then in 2019, when StoryCorps) contacted my friend Nancy Faust, the renowned retired White Sox baseball organist to see if she’d be willing to let them record a conversation with her in the Chicago StoryCorps booth, Nancy agreed “as long as Beth Finke is the one who interviews me.” What fun that interview was, and what an honor to be the interviewer Nancy Faust insisted on!

Earlier this month I received more news from StoryCorps Chicago: they will soon be featuring my conversations with Wanda Bridgeforth and with Nancy Faust in two separate posts on their StoryCorps blog.
But still, I’m sorry to see our StoryCorps Chicago booth go, it was a privilege to be part of these conversations and to hear other fabulous Chicago interviews on WBEZ all these years. My appreciation goes out to Amy Tardif, Regional Manager of the Chicago StoryBooth for listening, to Bill Healy, the talented producer and great guy who put together the StoryCorps conversations that aired on WBEZ and to the entire StoryCorps Chicago team. Thanks for the memories!

Want to stay connected and celebrate StoryCorps Chicago over the summer? A limited number of public appointments are available at Chicago’s StoryBooth now through June 30. I highly recommend it! It’s easy to make a reservation online or over the phone by calling 1-800-850-4406.

During our Covid year, I never got hooked on or binged any Netflix or other streaming shows. I did, however, binge watch cooking shows. Our PBS station, WTTW, stacks them pretty much all day long on Saturdays.

There’s America’s Test Kitchen, which, in addition to recipes and techniques, also does a segment evaluating cooking tools and ingredients From the best mixers to the best mayonnaise, it’s kind of cook’s Consumer Reports. Then there’s Cook’s Country. And Simply Ming. It’s kind of a meditation to me. The pace, watching the process, even the predictable “Oh my God that’s good” reaction after each dish is tasted is kind of soothing. (But just once I want someone to say “That’s just awful.”

You can stream the segment on Lesvos, which includes the heroic fisherman, by clicking here.

Several other Saturday shows are a sort of flavor of Anthony Bourdain’s stuff. They focus on a national cuisine, and they mix travel and cuisine with national and cultural history. And you learn about a lot more than cooking.

Lidia Bastianich hosts Lidia’s Kitchen, which focuses on Italian cuisine, culture and customs. Lidia reminds me so much of my Italian-born grandmother it hurts. On Milk Street, the hosts travel and bring home recipes from around the world. Pati’s Mexican Table explores … Mexico, so does Rick Bayless’ Mexico, One Plate at A Time. On My Greek Kitchen, Diane Kocilis travels all around Greece exploring history, culture, and food. And there’s one for Poland, another for Scandinavia.

Some of these shows have pivoted to filming in the home kitchens of the hosts, but it’s largely been reruns over the past year. That’s fine with me. I didn’t start watching until lockdown, so it’s all new to me.

During last Saturday’s My Greek Kitchen, host Kocilis visited with fisherman/chef Stratis Valiamos on the Greek Island of Lesvos. Remember the Mediterranean refugee crisis from 2016? Well, Stratis Valiamos was one of the good souls who used his fishing boat to rescue countless refugees, many of them who couldn’t swim. His description of those times were heartbreaking (his Greek was translated to subtitles.) He said that on more than one occasion, refugees threw their babies onto his boat—to be sure they made it on before it was filled to capacity.

Who knows how many lives he saved. And he was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

Check out this interview. Totally humble and compassionate. And he can cook.

That’s one cool dude.

Awhile back I posted about receiving and giving soup as a gift. A few weeks ago, the company we received and ordered from, Spoonful of Comfort, sent me an email—nothing unusual, as I had opted into their promotional emails. What was unusual was the subject—it wasn’t a special offer, it was an opportunity to opt out of Mother’s Day-themed emails.

The message was pretty thoughtful, noting there are any number of reasons that a person night not want to think about or hear about or participate in Mother’s Day festivities.

Beth and I well understand complicated feelings around celebrations like Mother’s Day and, for that matter, Father’s Day. Very early on, they were bittersweet days because they reminded us that parenting Gus wasn’t anything like the parenting experience of our contemporaries who had children–or the experience we’d imagined. We have always loved Gus as much as anyone loves their children. But that’s where the similarity ends.

Rather than get morose on Mother’s Day, Beth and I made a pact: We’d use the day to celebrate having made it one more year—Beth, me and Gus—as a family. Given that Gus was given a 50-50 chance of surviving his first night on earth, each year is no small feat. Given that he was born just a year after Beth lost her eyesight and that she was fighting to find her own footing, each year was and is quite a feat. She’s been one tough mutha to help raise a severely disabled child while adapting to blindness herself.

Beth was very serious about her cheese plate.

So this year we splurged and had a leisurely, lavish  fixed-price meal at our favorite restaurant, Sofi. It’s a cozy, rustic northern-Italian focused place that is conveniently located just outside our building entrance. Our neighborhood businesses, like all local small businesses, suffered mightily this past year. There was the pandemic, yes, but there was looting as well. The looting shuttered one beloved business for good. Others had to close temporarily to restock and repair.

We and other neighbors have held our breath, hoping against hope that Sofi would not fold. Fantastic and genuine food, old-world service, and lots of Italian spoken—it hearkens me back to Sunday afternoon meals at my Italian grandparents’ house.

We didn’t want to lose Sofi, so during the lockdowns we ordered take-out and bought gift cards. When Sofi put up a sidewalk tent this past winter Beth and I bundled up and ate on the patio next to propane heaters—as did our neighbors.

What better place to hold our survival celebration? We toasted to Gus, to each other, to our friends, to our waiter, to us all.

We made it another year.