Today’s guest blogger Nancy Lerman (and Lana the dog).

I am pleased to introduce Nancy Lerman as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Nancy has been in the Monday class I lead for The Village Chicago since it started in 2013 and has participated in a writing Program at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre for six years as well. That’s a lot of writing!

Several of the stories she’s written over the years have been about her fear of water., After conquering that fear two years ago, she now says swimming is one of her favorite relaxing activities.

It Started with a Book

by Nancy Lerman

The Pandemic has been a productive time for many. My husband Michael has reorganized the basement. Moved everything around in the garage. Labeled all the spices in my kitchen cabinet with purchase dates. Brilliant, right? Or is he playing the long game so that five years from now when he wants to throw bottles out, I can’t protest.

I, on the other hand, have closets of 20-year-old garments screaming to be sorted through and shipped off to Goodwill. The “Build Better Feet in 8 weeks” on-line program I purchased? You know, the one that promises to strengthen feet and leg muscles so I won’t need orthotics or have chronic foot pain? It remains untouched. And Beth’s writing prompt for last week, the one where we’re suppose to select an object in our house and write about it? Have you read anything in depth about an item in my house here? Well, here goes. The object I chose is a book.

An ever-growing stack of books sits on my bedside table. A dogged-eared copy of Conquer Your Fear of Water, A Self-Discovery Course in Swimming by Melon Dash tops the pile. I bought Melon’s book 15 years ago and spent several summers working through all the water exercises without much success. My fear of water ran deep.

I held onto the book hoping one day for a breakthrough. The breakthrough came when I mustered the courage to take a class in Sarasota, Florida taught by the author herself. With Melon’s help, I conquered a 40-plus-year fear of water and learned to swim.

But there’s always more fear around the corner.

This fall Chicago’s Goodman Theatre offered a class called Solo Voice through its popular GeNarrations program. The class targets folks wanting to write and eventually perform a 45-90 minute solo piece.

Having honed my craft on Beth’s five minute essays, the thought of a solo show is terrifying. Curiosity got the better of me, though, and I signed up.

What an excellent opportunity to expand some of my 500-word essays! But which ones? I plowed through years of Beth assignments. Whether it be a single story screaming for more airtime, or several stories to string together with a common theme, I wanted a topic that would have meaning for both the audience and for me. Swimming fit the bill.

Most people wrestle with anxiety and fear at some point. Flying. Driving. Public Speaking. Snakes. No one’s immune. Conquering my fear of water would be relatable. I came up with two goals:

1. Show how learning to slow down and stay present can allow a person to move from panic to safety
2. Demonstrate how water panic prevention skills can apply to everyday life

I’m still writing the first draft. Melon’s book provides inspiration.

Performing a solo show on stage for 45 minutes opens a floodgate of fears. But that’s fodder for another day. Right now getting all the ideas swimming around in my head down on a pool of paper is plenty.

Funny, how a book bought fifteen years ago continues to coax me to conquer new challenges.

My blog posts here have been pretty clear about how I feel about people in America faking their pet is a service dog to get them into places they are not allowed. So when news came out last Wednesday that the Department of Transportation (DOT) will no longer consider an emotional support animal to be a service animal, a popular online dog magazine called The Bark contacted me to write an article about the DOT decision. The decision paves the way for airlines to ban emotional support animals from flying for free in the cabin. My article retells a story I shared in a post here a while back about a small so-called emotional support dog lunging and yipping at my Seeing Eye dog Whitney while we were checking in for a flight at Chicago’s Midway Airport. An excerpt from my article in the current edition of The Bark:

Thousands of Americans who are blind or visually impaired use guide dogs. I trained with my first Seeing Eye dog, a black Labrador named Pandora, in 1991, 30 years ago. Whitney, my fourth guide dog, is 11 years old and retired in December last year. This past January I returned to the Seeing Eye in New Jersey to train with my fifth Seeing Eye dog. My January flight back home from Newark to O’Hare with Luna, a spunky two-year-old black Labrador, is the only time I’ve flown with her so far. My Seeing Eye dogs and I usually take about 20 flights a year to give presentations and speak at conferences. (Covid-19 has kept us close to home this year.)

You can read the entire Bark article here to learn more. Keep in mind that these regulations have not yet been officially published in the Federal Register, and federal regulations do not take effect until 30 days from the date they are published there. After that, when it comes to air travel, only dogs can be service animals. Companions used for emotional support won’t count. I see (ahem) this as good news.

Thank you, Department of Transportation, for listening to the concerns of people like me, who fly with qualified service dogs. Now, once COVID-19 vaccines come through, Luna and I can feel confident about returning safely to our lives as regular air travelers.

An earlier version of this post was published at the Easterseals National blog.

Save for our favorite sandwich joint Standing Room Only (which was done in by looting), the small businesses in our neighborhood are hanging on. Even the restaurants are eking by. So far.

In Chicago, bars that don’t serve food were closed by city order. Establishments with licenses to serve food have been allowed to stay open, mostly for take-out. Restaurants with sidewalk patios can continue to serve outdoors. And restaurants that have large windows can seat people at tables immediately adjacent to those open windows.

It’s December, and well, yes, our friends and neighbors are bundling up and dining

TGIF in Chicago, 2020

and imbibing al fresco or nearly al fresco.

Dining out—even outside–is a calculated risk in these times. But it’s a risk some people have been willing to take, carefully and masked, of course. Not only for mental health, but to support the proprietors of the businesses that help make our neighborhood our neighborhood.

People like the owners of Half Sour: Liz, Emily, and Jesse. They opened up only a couple years ago. Opening a restaurant/bar is a tight-rope walk without a net, but this trio has done a great job of adapting on the fly. By the start of this year, they already had a loyal, steady clientele of regulars, and they were keeping their special events space rolling.

And then, COVID. (Jesse once remarked to Emily: “What are the chances that we’d open a restaurant and then a pandemic would strike?” To which their 6-year-old son replied, “100 percent dad. Because it just did.”)

At places like Half Sour and other restaurants on and around our block, fire-pit tables and propane heaters have become commonplace. As have vented tents. And people are using them. And the businesses are going through propane, fast.

Liz is the propane manager at Half Sour. “I love going to the propane place,” she said the other day. She found a place on the near South Side that refills them, and they’re cheap. It’s open from 7:00 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day and does a brisk business. Ours is apparently not the only neighborhood that craves fire these days. Liz says vehicles line up with empty tanks on board, and they leave ready to burn.

The dark side is that it’s burning fossil fuels. But in the big scheme of things, COVID has reduced greenhouse gases, and the patio burners are a drop in the bucket.

And right now, we gotta do what we can do.

I am pleased to feature Janie Isackson as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. A retired educator, Janie is in the “Me, Myself and I” memoir class that used to meet at the Chicago Cultural Center. That class meets via Zoom now and enjoys each others’ company so much that they’ve started their own Zoom movie review group, too. I Zoomed in yesterday to hear them discuss “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Many there were young adults in 1968 and had great stories to share.
Janie’s is one of them.

by Janie Isackson

Grant Park, 1968.

My father died in August of 1967. Faced with the numbing loss of my wonderful dad, I left my parents’ comfortable home in West Rogers Park in Chicago by the end of the following school year. Abandoning my mother less than a year after my father died filled me with enormous guilt, but not leaving then meant I would have remained there until forever.

My rented corner apartment was just two blocks from Lincoln Park, where Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the colorful demonstrators and protesters were camping out. Our apartment faced both Lincoln Park and Clark Street, so my roommate and I had a birdseye view of everything going on.

Having a naïve understanding of the political and social climate, I would wander over to the park often that August just to gape at the “Be-In” in Lincoln Park. Only four months earlier Martin Luther King was assassinated; then in June, Robert Kennedy. I’d left my parents’ home, my childhood home of 23 years, amidst the turmoil of the spring and summer of 1968. My own psyche mirrored all of the events taking place: trying to figure out how I could be a different kind of school teacher when returning in fall to the high school where I taught, and trying to figure out how I could make learning matter… all the while determined to no longer wear pantyhose. Such lofty goals.

The kid from Rogers Park was on her way to a new life. Leaving home had left me feeling forlorn: The world had suddenly shifted. I had gone from being a teenager to a woman living on my own, pretending to feel liberated. Seeing Minnie Riperton and the Rotary Connection at a small club on Division Street. The Jefferson Airplane at the Kinetic Playground. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies marching down N. Clark Street.

Then my roommate and I were tear-gassed by the police. Wasn’t this new way of life supposed to be thrilling?

The teargassing happened as we opened our apartment windows to gape at the marchers below: the gas floated up to the 14th floor. My eyes burned and breathing was labored. Is this how it felt to be reviled?

Sandburg Village, where we lived, has enormous open courtyards. The day after the Yippies marched, I found myself sitting on a bench in one of those courtyards, mute and immobile. And the 1968 Democratic Convention hadn’t even started yet.

Until then history and politics had always occurred outside my presumably sheltered existence. But then, on August 28th, 1968, I rode my 1939 blue and white Schwinn bicycle to Grant Park, parking myself and the bike on the west side of the hill with the statue of General John Logan. I listened to anti-war protesters giving speeches in Grant Park and watched the crowd begin to stir. Then violence erupted. It was scary. The police were armed guards with clubs and helmets, beating the protesters. The Schwinn bicycle and I fled, glad even now that I was on my bicycle, not on foot.

I rode my blue and white 1939 Schwinn bicycle to the hill across from the Conrad Hilton that day, yes, to observe. But even then I knew I went there so I might be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw the melee firsthand. This was my introduction. 1968 was a dramatic year for me personally: moving out of my parents’ home. But it took the assassination of two significant national leaders and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to see myself as part of a larger universe.

Hope you had a great holiday—we sure did. I made turkey, stuffing, mashed taters, and brussels sprouts (with pancetta) for me and Beth.  And then I had to figure out what to do with all the leftovers. Small turkeys were in short supply so I ended up with a big one. But thankfully, some neighbors agreed to help us out and take some of it. We delivered it during a bundled up and blanketed, masked, distanced gathering of our neighborhood friends at our little park. We opened festivities with a bubbly toast to our friend who recently finished a course of chemotherapy, and then a group toast to one another. It was about as thankful a Thanksgiving.

The one, the only, Randy Newman.

Other than that, I pretty much have nothing, but I have come across some interesting reads.

Here’s one that’s in the LA Review of Books (no, it’s not a book review) about one of my favorite artists on the occasion of his birthday: Randy Newman. Titled Adrift in Cosmic Quarantine: Randy Newman Turns 77, it’s a very well researched and written piece—there’s a ton of stuff I never knew. I mean I knew he wrote things like “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” made famous in 1970 by Three Dog Night. I didn’t get started with Randy Newman until Sail Away and have most of everything he’s done since. But he was at it for years before that. From the article:

His first charting record came via Vic Dana, who sang “I Wanna Be There” in 1961, the singer complaining bitterly about not getting invited to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. Then the Fleetwoods picked up “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” with its command of pop’s evanescence, and soon top-shelf singers were grabbing on to Newman’s sturdy material: Erma Franklin, with “Love Is Blind” (1963); the Walker Brothers, with “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore”(1964); Jackie DeShannon, with “She Don’t Understand Him Like I Do” (1964). Some songs, like “Nobody Needs Your Love More Than I Do” (1965), featured a sure pop strut that elevated Gene Pitney’s reedy, pinched delivery. Newman’s material crossed deftly from pop into soul, with “Big Brother” by The Persuasions (1965), “Love Is Blind” by Lou Rawls (1964), “Friday Night” by the O’Jays (1966), and especially Jerry Butler’s “I Don’t Want to Hear Anymore”(1964). He even placed a song with his guru, Fats Domino, who sang “Honest Papas Love Their Mamas Better” in 1968.

Anyway, great article, with lots of pop music history—give it a read.

And this isn’t a read but it’s eye-opening. (Hat tip to our friend Kyle for sharing it.) It’s a Centers for Disease Control map and ranking of states by the number of gun deaths per 100,000. I’ll submit without comment.

Firearm Mortality by State

Our health care friends (a doc and physician assistant) are better after COVID bouts. Better enough to make it through workdays, but by their accounts, just barely. The devilish fatigue that is often leftover makes it hard to get through each day.

And this doesn’t help. It’s an account by an ICU nurse that speaks for itself. Folks, if you hate liberals, or you hate government guidance, don’t hate your fellow Americans who are literally being driven into exhaustion and some out of the profession—health care workers.

To end on a happier note, Beth surprised me with a gift this past weekend: Richard Ford’s latest collection of short stories. It’s titled Sorry for Your Trouble. I didn’t even know he had a new collection out. So now I have a set of little gems to look forward to, some based in New Orleans.

And I’m already dreaming of our next trip to New Orleans, whenever it’s safe.