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.

During my reading over the past weeks I came across a couple of articles that make clear that our society has not always given police legal carte blanche about what justifies a shooting of a citizen. Right now, in layman’s terms, all a cop has to do is pretty much say (s)he was afraid for their life. (Which, when you think about it, is goofy on its face—as the most skittish officers will be more likely to shoot first and ask questions later.) Any decision deemed “split second” justifies shooting, in essence.

A good read.

That approval by the legal system didn’t always exist. In fact, the standard for justified shooting was higher until 1989 when the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice William Rehnquist,” weighed in.

From “Split-Second Decisions: How a Supreme Court Case Shaped Modern Policing;” in the New York Times:

The officers’ justification for the use of lethal force in each instance differs with the circumstances. But as in almost every other recent case involving questions of police use of force, law enforcement officials defending the officers are relying on a doctrine set forth by the Supreme Court three decades ago and now deeply ingrained in police culture: that judges and juries should not second-guess officers’ split-second decisions, no matter how unnecessary a killing may appear in hindsight.

It’s a meaty but very worthwhile read.

This piece in the National Law Journal explains the legalities even better—also highly recommended.

By my lights, police unions and law-and-order hawks have perverted the Rehnquist court’s decision in a way that even Chief Justice Rehnquist would think produced deadly unintentional consequences.

I think we and the police have to do better. And I think we can. I offer this article, from New Jersey.com, in evidence.

Newark cops, with reform, didn’t fire a single shot in 2020

As is this.

That headline sums it up. Mind you, Newark ain’t Mayberry, so this was a remarkable accomplishment born of afederal consent decree. Diversifying the force, de-escalation training, deploying the Newark Community Street Team to defuse violence in the city’s most violent wards, and an array of other efforts made an enormous difference.

Beyond binary arguments about police being good or bad, beyond blaming the victims of shootings, I see some hope.

Al Hippensteel

I am pleased to introduce Al Hippensteel as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Raised on the far south side of Chicago, Al has been a White Sox fan since 1957, he’s been married to his wife Donna since 1972, and says he “has never met a donut he didn’t like.”

After years working in the ad departments of Suburban newspapers, he transitioned to a 20-year career in the printing industry. Retired now, he serves as editor of three newsletters, including the popular Dearborn Express that covers news in our Printers Row neighborhood. When his fellow memoir-writing class member Regan Burke suggested “Witness” as a writing prompt, Al came back with a piece so thoughtful (and in the end, so positive) that it reads like a Poem.

by Al Hippensteel

Ihave witnessed the greatest threat to the health of all earthly people in a hundred years in the form of a pandemic.

I have witnessed the most chaos and divisiveness in US politics since the Civil War.

I have witnessed the greatest amount of economic pain weighing down on the average citizen since the Great Depression.

I have witnessed an all-out assault on the veracity of the fourth estate, our traditional news media.

I have witnessed the resulting mental anguish and depression caused by all of the above.

Conversely…

I have witnessed heroic individuals in medical gowns saving people’s lives.

I have witnessed a group of workers providing us with essential services while bravely facing the virus danger.

I have witnessed a resurgence of activism and protests relating to social justice like Black Lives Matter; or a voice for indigenous people, the Chi-Nations Youth Council; or Help increase the Peace sponsored by American Friends Service Project, a Quaker group.

I have witnessed young people protesting together, supporting each other, representing no fewer than a dozen causes.

I have witnessed people reaching deep into their pockets to support financially-strapped businesses.

I have witnessed creativity in art, music and dance to provide us with culture virtually in the desert of closed venues.

As we look forward toward the light at the end of a long tunnel, we will witness change. We have changed. The world has changed. Our habits have changed. We will witness the peeling off of layers of fear, illness, and misinformation.

The world has always been a miasma of good and evil. It will be the youth with their ideals and optimism who will guide us to a better place. We are a better people than we were 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or even 10 years ago. We don’t know it. We just can’t see it yet.

But we will witness it.