I am pleased to feature Gabriela Freese as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Her parents immigrated from Germany to South America; she and her twin sister were born and raised in Paraguay, and Gabriela immigrated to Chicago in 1959, where she met her husband, a German immigrant.

Gabriela received a degree in dentistry from Loyola University in Chicago and had a practice in suburban Oak Park. After retiring, she moved to Admiral at the Lake in Chicago and has been in the memoir class I lead there ever since the class started. We meet via Zoom now, and when I assigned “Free at Last” as a writing prompt to honor Martin Luther King’s birthday last month, she came back with this beautiful essay.

by Gabriela Freese

It was the first time in my life that I got to watch someone draw their last breath. it was more like a sigh. Nine days in a deep coma were the last chapter in my husband’s life. It got very quiet in the room, no more rattling anxious breaths. We sat in wonder as we watched peace enter the room…and stay. Yes, he was now free, free at last. It was such a relief to witness this torture end.

I had been next to my husband for the nine days he was in a coma, spoke to him, and tried to comfort him. It is said that hearing is the last thing to go, although a reaction was no longer possible.

This was in 2010, and the passing of time has softened many of the sharp corners of those days. I cannot tell you how relieved I was when his torture was over.

Yes, he was free at last.

But was I free also? The toll that years of caregiving takes on the carer is huge. We chalk it up to having the energy to do more and more like we did when we were “young,” creating a deep emotional exhaustion that some people will never overcome and others, like me, had the strength to focus on other aspects of life that were totally out of reach before.

Still, going to the Symphony alone? A trip? Actually, quite wonderful. Nonetheless, it took me four years to settle back into my own person — thanks to support groups, friends and especially, my children that had to deal with the ups and downs of their own lives.

Susan Lane, a friend I had met in a support group, lived here at the Admiral and invited me to those great Sunday brunches where everyone enjoys the food and has a good time. That made my decision to move to the Admiral quite easy.

None of us expected a pandemic, of course, but friends of mine who still live on their own sometimes marvel at my stories. “Oh, the Admiral plans this for you?” they ask. “They do that for you?”

Hmmm.

When thinking of my own freedom from household chores and all that, I’m grateful, of course. But am even more grateful for what lies behind me.

Live and Learn? When I find myself in need of assurance, I look to friends and family around me. What lies ahead of me goes on forever.

Once upon a time, this was cutting edge technology.

At my first job after college, in the early 1980s, I used a typewriter. I worked at a fledgling non-profit magazine, so we didn’t have the Cadillac of typewriters—the IBM Selectric. Instead, we had salvaged, second hand stuff.

A few years later, working at the University of Illinois Office of Publications, I got an IBM PC with two floppy drives. One ran WordPerfect, the other was for the document files. Graphic designers gave us strict word counts based on the space afforded on their page dummies. We’d send the floppy with the WordPerfect files to a service bureau, who would then follow instructions from our designers regarding type face, size, column width, and son.

The designers would get back shiny typeset paper that they’d then paste onto their pages. If it didn’t fit, we writers would be told to cut X number of words. If there were problems due to our error, we fixed the WordPerfect file and sent it back for new typeset copy.

It was painstaking and laborious but…it enforced a discipline. Do overs literally cost money. We always strove to get everything just right the first time.

Enter Aldus Pagemaker and desktop publishing. Designers could set their own type, and fiddle with page design.

But.

The discipline that old process enforced vanished. The knowledge that it was easy to change a word or a photo at any time tempted some to constantly fiddle. Each fiddle introduced the possibility of creating new problems.

It also created a monster of sorts—the ability to use fonts, colors, and graphics—without any actual design ability. Really bad fliers and signs started popping up everywhere. At one restaurant in Urbana there were so many different desktop published placards and so many different colors and fonts that it would kill my appetite.

All that gave way to the Internet, where no document or article seems to be set in stone, to be final, and where it’s commonplace to find typos and other errors on the websites of major publications and organizations.

Of course, it’s all kind of wondrous. I mean everyone can have a web site, anyone (hey, look at me) can post a blog. And anyone can do a video or a podcast.

But probably not everyone should. Now get off my lawn!

I am pleased to feature Howard Marks as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. After graduating from the University of Illinois-Chicago (and serving as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper) he worked at the Chicago Today and the Chicago Tribune and received a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. Semi-retired in Washington, D.C. now, Howard participates in our memoir-writing classes via Zoom. How fortunate to have him in class to share this first-person account on life in D.C. this past month.

by Howard S. Marks

This would have been my twelfth Presidential Inauguration since I moved to Washington, DC in 1975. My first was the swearing-in of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter as the 39th President of the United States. President Carter’s inauguration would be the last one on the east front of the Capitol Building.

A checkpoint.

President Reagan changed all that four years later. Now new and re-elected Presidents are sworn-in on the west front of the Capitol facing towards the American frontier. The swearing-in of Illinois Senator Barack Obama in 2009 as the first president of color was the most exciting, with an estimated 1.8 million people attending.

We already knew the 2021 inauguration of former Vice President Joe Biden would be different. Washington, DC was racked by civil unrest during the summer, the nation was in the midst of pandemic, and President Trump wanted to overturn the results of the November election.

And then, with the inauguration just weeks away, the unthinkable occurred. The U.S. Capitol Building, the hallowed icon of American democracy, was attacked by a mob resulting in at least two deaths and numerous injuries.

Living midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, my wife Sandy and I found ourselves in the newly declared “Green Zone.” Set up by the U.S. Secret Service, the Green Zone was the outer layer of security – the “Red Zone” was two blocks closer to the National Mall.

An eight-foot-high temporary fence was erected, and hundreds of Jersey concrete barriers were set up to block all traffic. The National Mall became off-limits with no visitors allowed.

Life in the Green Zone was out of a stage set. Pedestrians and cyclists were allowed to roam freely, but streets were devoid of cars (drivers were required to prove they were on official business or were residents in order to enter). The usually bustling Metrorail station below our condo building was closed, as were all other downtown stations.

Pennsylvania National Guardsmen with M-4 rifles at the ready were there to staff nearby checkpoints. Twenty-five thousand guardsmen were here from all 50 states and three U.S. territories. Metropolitan Police were on 12-hour shifts. None were allowed to take leaves.

Bridges to the Virginia suburbs were closed, too, blocking access to airports. Downtown garages inside the red zone were closed.

Back in the Green Zone, our garage remained open, but only for monthly parkers like us. Most stores were closed. Restaurants were open for take-out, and food stores were open as well.

The day before the inauguration, reporters from French National Radio interviewed me while I was out walking the dog. I had to escort the late-night concierge for our building out of the green zone so he could get a shared-ride service home. On inauguration day I distributed Nature Bakery raspberry and blueberry fig bars to members of the Pennsylvania National Guard (young men from Central and Northwest Pennsylvania). They were very grateful.

The barriers came down two days after the inauguration, but the memory of a capital city and a nation under siege will endure forever in the annals of American history.

I had the day off last Monday, so I played hooky on the blog, too. Besides wanting a break, I really didn’t know how to do right by Dr. King, and so, my day of silence.

We had a terrific MLK weekend. We took the Metra commuter line to Glen Ellyn Saturday afternoon. Last time we took the train, we didn’t even have to buy tickets. This time one window was open at Ogilvie Transportation Center, and we bought tickets. It felt kinda normal. Sorta. Luckily, everyone was masked and the cars were pretty empty. Our friend Jenny picked us up and chauffeured us to her and her Husband Dean’s back yard.

The view from our room

It was pretty cold, but they have an enormous outdoor fireplace and Dean had constructed a sort of open-air enclosure that provided a roof and a wind break. Beth has been friends with Jenny, Dean, and Jenny’s sister Jill since…high school. And they still talk to each other! Actually, we have a gas together. Cocktails are involved.

Was it a risk? Not much of one. They’ve all been tested umpteen times in order to meet with their children and grandchildren. Beth and I have had it already, and I’d been tested that very morning.

The short of it: It was a very low risk effort with an extremely rich and much needed reward. Ain’t nothing like laughing out loud in the company of friends. Beats the hell out of LOLing virtually.

From there Beth and I got a Lyft to Geneva, Illinois, a sweet little town on the Fox River that we called home for a few years in the 1990s. We stayed at a beautiful, rustic hotel called the Herrington Inn. built in 1874, it was originally a creamer that had been meticulously restored and expanded by the time we moved to town. It’s right on the river, and from our balcony we could hear the water swirl by. On Sunday it snowed, and it was idyllic.

The town is almost painfully quaint with gift shops and little restaurants. And it’s just what the doctor ordered. Masks were prevalent. Except. There were several restaurants flying in the face of directives that were still in place last weekend. They were seating people inside, and the distancing was iffy. We walked by a bar and I was sorry to see that the bar was open with patrons three deep watching football. Most sans masks.

On Saturday night upon arrival, we ordered room service, and the next night we dined in a heated tent. Servers and patrons were masked.

We’ve been eating outdoors at our favorite Italian restaurant pretty regularly. It’s a fantastic place owned by a native of Milan, and his perfectionism comes through in the food and the service.

We don’t want it to go out of business. Once a week we share a propane heater and have a sumptuous meal. Staff is masked and meticulous about hygiene, and we keep our masks on as much as possible.

We’ve also had drinks at our local, Half Sour, which is permitted to have indoor guests only at tables that are adjacent to big open windows. We need to get out and they need business. We judge it to be a risk worth taking, and dressing for the cold is weirdly fun.

It’s been so hard on everyone. Many of the restrictions have seemed like blunt instruments. Here in Illinois, casinos opened before restaurants. If you serve food you can have limited indoor guests, but if you don’t—like our beloved Jazz Showcase—you’re out of luck.

On the other hand, the idiotic flaunting of wearing masks in the name of freedom is ridiculous. Freedom is not the absence of responsibility.

All this reminded me of an article in The Atlantic from way back in May. (It references a death toll of 70,000. Man.) The headline, way back on May 11, was “Quarantine Fatigue Is Real.”

The subhead was, “Instead of an all-or-nothing approach to risk prevention, Americans need a manual on how to have a life in a pandemic.”

It argued to take a harm reduction approach. It borrows from approaches to AIDs and drug use that don’t shame and don’t insist on abstinence so much as encourage less risky, safer behavior. From the article:

In the earliest years of the HIV epidemic, confusion and fear reigned. AIDS was still known as the “gay plague.” To the extent that gay men received any health advice at all, it was to avoid sex. In 1983, the activists Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, with guidance from the virologist Joseph Sonnabend, published a foundational document for their community, called “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Recognizing the need for pleasure in people’s lives, the pamphlet rejected abstinence as the sole approach and provided some of the earliest guidance on safer sex for gay men, including recommendations about condoms and which sex acts had a lower or higher risk for disease transmission.

The article’s author, an epidemiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School, suggested way back in May that wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and redesigning spaces could make life more livable in the time of Covid.

Everyone has a different threshold for risk—especially in these times. We have immunosuppressed friends who can’t take even small risks. And then we have friends who just got over the virus and feel comfortably safe for a few months.

Whatever your threshold, wear a mask and be careful out there.

I am pleased to feature 99-year-old Wanda Bridgeforth as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know Wanda – she’d been attending the memoir writing class I led in downtown Chicago for nearly two decades before coronavirus hit last year.

What you might not know about Wanda is that she is an immigrant: she was born in Canada. Hamilton, Ontario to be exact. The woman Wanda has always affectionately called Mama is the woman who adopted Wanda as an infant and loved and raised her. Mama had to work “in family” during the Great Depression, and the “Ma Hale” mentioned in this essay was one of many helpful women in Chicago’s Black Metropolis who pitched in to take care of young Wanda while Mama lived with the families she cooked and cleaned for.

Mama’s resilience and determination has influenced Wanda’s own life ever since. Sheltering-in-place in her apartment now, Wanda fills her days with episodes of Jeopardy!, naps, meals, and visits from Wanda Jr. The rest of the time you’ll find her looking out the window, amazed at the beauty of Lake Michigan and the sky above. “And sometimes I just close my eyes and reminisce,” she says. “It makes me happy.”

By Wanda Bridgeforth

A young friend asked me how I was surviving the quarantine. “Just like I lived through other crises,” I told her.

It is hard to believe that the first house we lived in when we came to Chicago was still lit by gas lamps on the walls, fireplaces in every room and a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The kitchen was so large -Ma Hale’s work space was an old dining table set in the center of the room. Chairs lined two walls, and we children had our snacks, played games, and did our homework on one side and the end of it. On Friday and Saturday evenings the family gathered around the table for games and chit-chat.

This past year I received a container of herbal vegetable soup in the mail for my birthday. The first spoonful took me back to pre-depression days when a pot of soup and a pot of coffee were on the back burners every day. Mama and Ma Hale called it “Scrap Soup.” How comforting and cozy to sit at the table with hands wrapped around a mug, sipping soup that warmed body and soul.

When I moved to Jefferey Avenue, I introduced my nephews and niece there to this delicious dish, but there was a bit of difference in the flavor (the early soup was made with vegetables fresh from Ma Hale’s backyard garden). Ma Hale would put a soup bone into a big stew pot, add water, the saved tips, ends from beets, carrots, skin from onions and potatoes, stems from greens, hulls from green peas, cores from cabbage and cauliflower. She’d add a bit of salt pork or bacon rind, and, lastly, seasoning to taste. The aroma filled the house as it steeped slowly on the back burner of the wood-fired stove, and the soup I received for my birthday reminded me so much of the scrap soup of yesteryears that I keep ordering more!