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!

José with his wife, Kate .

I am pleased to feature José DiMauro as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Born in Argentina, José graduated from medical school at Univ De Buenos Aires. He left home in 1963 to start his medical career at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital, then became board certified as a pathologist at University of Illinois in Chicago. After retiring, Dr. DiMauro moved with his wife Kate to Admiral at the Lake, where I lead a weekly memoir-writing class via Zoom. All of us who continue wearing masks to keep ourselves and others safe will surely relate to this essay.

by José DeMauro

A summer day in 2020. With the invisible threat around us, we had finally set into a daily routine. Every day after breakfast we would put on our masks and go for a walk along our stretch of Lincoln Park, or along Lake Michigan itself. Those walks were our escape from the lockdown.

Yes, we visited our children a couple of times, too, but always in their backyards, masks up. We occasionally ventured to restaurants, nervously eyeing the other customers sitting six feet from us. Trips to the grocery? those were just furtive 100-meter dashes.

But those daily walks to the park or lakefront were our real moments of freedom. Even if some viral particles were floating around, they would not possibly survive the fresh air and the beauty!

So we felt safe on that late summer morning. We rushed from our apartment energized, not wanting to waste any more time inside. We happily greeted neighbors and the personnel in the lobby. They greeted back to us. The world was perfect.

Through the sliding doors we went, carefree, east, towards the Lake, the sun stroking our faces. It was then that I raised my hand, and a sudden feeling of dread overtook me.

I had forgotten my mask!

Not even Kate, with her own mask neatly secured to her face, had noticed it. The people that greeted us had said nothing! Was its shyness on their part? Or had they really missed my absent mask? We see what we expect to see at times.

My hand covered my mouth with shame, as Eve hiding her nude body when expelled from the Garden of Eden. I felt desolate, suddenly ejected from bliss and freedom. The inviting and safe world had turned foreign, hostile, dangerous. I felt…Naked!

What to do?

I thought of turning back. We hesitated. The sunny park was calling from across the street. The traffic light turned green. With my hand still on my mouth, we crossed.

The long winding path canopied by a full foliage was relaxing. Each time we came upon other nature lovers, I instinctively raised my hand to my face.

Funny, in years past, when I would see TV images with people wearing face masks on the streets during flu season in East Asian countries, I would dismiss that as just an “Oriental thing.”. It was my new normal now!

I felt as if I was in one of those dreams where we are suddenly found without clothes, exposed to ridicule and disgrace. But passersby seemed unconcerned. Many were not wearing masks themselves, some carrying them under their noses. We continued, greeted by birds and squirrels oblivious to my fears, interested only in picking up the nuts that Kate invariably carried to throw for them. Toddlers ran free around young parents, discovering summer for the first time. Would it be their normal to see people with masks?

We finally completed our usual periplus and returned to the familiar confines of our building, but this time, I did it hurriedly, with my head down, hands over my mouth. As soon as I entered the lobby, I ran for the box with the supply of masks for visitors, snatched the first one on top, and donned it quickly

What a sense of relief…as if I had finally pulled my pants up!

A couple of the responses I got to the post I wrote about the high cost of insulin were so encouraging and helpful I thought I’d share them with you blog readers today. First, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) wrote to let me know they have partnered with dozens of other organizations to create getInsulin.org, a site full of resources to help with insulin access. Kudos to those organizations for working together to get all those helpful resources available in one place. And then, a note from a mom on Long Island who remembers me from a 2014 visit to her daughter’s elementary school. Penny has worked in the clinical trials industry for 23 years, and her note brought up some unsung heroes I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. I appreciated her insight, asked if I could share her note here as a guest blog, and…here it is.

by Penny Wong-Matzelle

Your article Cheaper Than Water struck a chord with me. I work in a clinical trials lab, so my customers are these Pharma Companies.

I’ve worked in this industry with so many amazing individuals whose hearts and minds are in the right place. For sure, many get into this line of work because they know their efforts can bring life-saving drugs to market and improve the quality of life for patients. But clearly, something happens between that person’s seat at the lab and that of the CEOs of these corporations.

Stockholders and greedy boards send the message that the almighty dollar is the most important bottom line. And that saddens me, especially for all of the incredible work that is done at lower levels within these organizations.

We are working with so many companies right now that are trying to bring COVID cures and vaccines into reality. I can’t adequately express the tireless efforts so many individuals are putting forth in order to achieve this. Here are a few examples of the lengths they are going to in order to see that safe vaccine are created and distributed as quickly as possible:

• moving from one region to another as needed
• leaving their kids and family behind temporarily in order to work under quarantine
• working seven days a week to ensure critical path trials continue on their fast-track course to drug approval
• making genuine efforts from every clinical trial arena to be a part of the solution to this pandemic.

Many of these workers are doing all of that while home-schooling, no less! Their dedication keeps me going. Their determination encourages me to stick around for the good fight, even when things are trying. Their selflessness gives me hope that there is good in the world.

So when I am reminded of the challenges of health care in our country, it’s disheartening to think forward and fear that some of these treatments will not be available to some who may not have access to health care in the U.S., all because of policies, red tape and greed. Awareness is step one, and I’ve shared your post with everyone I know in the industry and beyond. If any of them rise up the ladders of those corporate entities that hold the power, or if they get involved in local governance, little by little, we can be a part of the change that so many of us would love to see.