During the dot.com craze I worked for a tech firm. Together with my colleagues, we alternately experienced exhilaration, a sense of triumph, and a sense of doom. Sometimes all within 24 hours. At moments, we believed we would one day rule the world. Then, some news would make us wonder whether we’d still be in business in three months.

Stress weighed on everyone—especially at the top. But even plebes like me suffered from it. There were moments when I thought my head was going to explode right there at my desk. You likely know the feeling.

On a flight home from a business trip, I sat next to a serviceman and got into a long strangers on the plane discussion. The guy had an enormous intellect and had a deep interest in Buddhism and Eastern medicine. As we stood up to file out, he handed me a little paperback called “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

“Are you sure,” I asked.

“Just promise me you’ll read it,” he said. We wished each other well and that’s the last I ever saw of my seatmate.

I’m a skeptic by nature, and often a cynic. I’m not particularly religious, though I believe there’s a big force out there that most of us are trying to understand. On my own, I would’ve never been inclined to read such a book. But the thoughtfulness of the gift was compelling. And, well, I made a promise.

I read it, and I’m glad I did. The book itself is a kind of meditation, and it includes simple breathing and meditative exercises.

I read it back in oh, 1996. When I’d feel the pressure and stress building and could picture it bursting out of my chest like the Alien, I’d close the door to my office (oh, for real offices again), sit, and practice these little exercises. It only took five or 10 minutes to slow my pulse, and presumably lowered my blood pressure.

And for years since then, I’ve used those exercises whenever necessary. On June 2nd of this year, my birthday, Beth gifted me a book entitled “Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art.” She and I had listened to a radio interview with the author, James Nestor.

Years earlier Nestor wrote a book called “Deep” about free divers—people who can hold their breath and swim underwater for 10 minutes at a time. When Nestor learned that they’d trained themselves to increase lung capacity, he was fascinated.

Motivated also by his own chronic maladies, including respiratory and sinus issues, he went on a 10-year personal research crusade.

In “Breath,” he takes the reader around the globe, meeting cutting edge breathing experts he calls “pulmonauts.” Some are credentialed researchers and scientists. Others came from all walks of life, and had been helped by one or another breathing technique and were driven to learn more.

The author signs up for a harrowing experiment that requires him to breathe only through his mouth for 10 days, then normally for 10 days, then only through his nose for 10 days. The physiological results for nose breathing compared to the other methods were stunningly improved.

He also crawls deep beneath Paris in its catacombs to study…skulls. Turns out mouths used to be a lot bigger than they are now. When our ancestors learned to cook and otherwise process food, they chewed less, and over time, our mouths got smaller. Our airways also got smaller, and…our teeth got crooked. Skulls before that uniformly showed perfectly straight teeth, all without braces.

As it turns out, people have been studying and practicing intentional therapeutic breathing techniques pretty much forever across cultures, religions and geographies. And they arrived at strikingly similar conclusions about how to breathe. From the book:

In 2001, researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy gather two dozen subjects, covered them with sensors to measure blood flow, heart rate and nervous system feedback, then had them recite a Buddhist mantra as well as the original Latin version of the rosary, the Catholic prayer cycle of the Ave Maria, which is repeated half by a priest and half by the congregation. They were stunned to find the average number of breaths for each cycle was “almost exactly” identical, just a bit quicker than the Hindu, Taoist, and Native American prayers: 5.5 breaths per minute.

But what was even more stunning was what breathing like this did to the subjects. Whenever they followed this slow breathing pattern, blood flow to the brain increased and the systems in the body entered state of coherence, when the functions of the heart, circulation, and nervous system are coordinated to peak efficiency.

Lately, breath and breathing (and the denial thereof) have been headline subjects on more than one front. After my bout with covid19, I’ve had a hard time filling my lungs to their fullest. I can’t climb flights of stairs like I used to, and the shortest of walks can leave me winded. After some exercise and using techniques from this book, that’s improving.

It’s easy to take breathing for granted. I never will again.

I am pleased to introduce Nancy O’Shea as our featured “Saturdays with Seniors” blogger today. The former Public Relations Director for Chicago’s Field Museum, Nancy also edited the museum’s membership magazine. Now retired, she enjoys taking classes in memoir writing. Lucky for us: we all enjoy hearing her read her essays out loud in class, too!

This week is the last meeting of our six-week experiment in Zoom memoir classes, and to mark its success I came up with an assignment I hoped writers might find challenging — and fun. “Write an essay that is 26 sentences long about any topic you choose,” I told them. “Have the first sentence begin with any letter of the alphabet, and have each sentence after that begin with the subsequent letter of the alphabet.” To help explain, I came up with an example off the top of my head. “You mean it? Zany assignment. A challenge for sure. But I’ll give it a try…”.

Writers rose to the occasion, returning the next week with essays about gardening, trips to Japan, work conflicts, mountain biking, a beloved dog, you name it. Nancy took the opportunity to write this poignant piece about her mother, starting with the letter “I.” Read closely and you’ll see how she took the alphabet full-circle: her last sentence starts with “H.”

There Will be Hugs

Nancy and her mother back when they could be together.

by Nancy O’Shea

I should be writing to my mother. Just thinking of her makes me sad. Knitting together memories, I reflect on her and the life she used to have.

Living — if you can call it that — in a senior facility during this pandemic, it’s like she’s on a desert island. Meals and mail deliveries are measurements of time. Nothing else changes for her. Oh, how good it will be when we can get together again!

Pre-coronavirus, we took our visits for granted. Quiz shows we watched, sitting in her apartment — Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! — are cherished memories now. Really, the mundane has been elevated. Simple things — embracing, sharing coffee and cookies — have taken on new meaning.

The pandemic has shown us what’s essential in life. Unless this illness had descended upon us, would we have known? Very likely we would have continued day in, day out, unaware of our need for human contact.

We have improvised, using technology as a map that guides us to each other. X marks the spot. Yet technology has its limits. Zoom meetings are a fragile lifeline.

A history of this time will call it a crisis. But I think there will be an upside. Clouds will part. Driving once again on society’s open highway, I hope we will have learned to appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

Everyone will have a different take on what this time meant to them. For some, it will represent hardship, even death. Gosh, I’m so fortunate in that regard!

Hugs may be delayed, but there will be hugs, and they will be long and tight.

Hello everybody. Hope you are well.

Last Wednesday was our first date night in a loooonnnng time.

Let’s get the citizen business out of the way first.

Here’s a reading assignment.

It includes practical steps toward making things better.

My finding this article was sparked by a conversation I had last night with two friends. Both are highly accomplished professionals working for publicly traded corporations. Both are Black. One is a woman, with whom I had a long discussion long ago about the talk she had to have with her son as he came of age. About how to act and not to act, in great specificity, in any encounter with law enforcement. I don’t remember having such a talk with my parents.

She and I and mutual friends have had difficult discussions about our different experiences more than once in the past. We’ve touched nerves. And wondered whether we’d crossed lines. But as she pointed out, we somehow always worked through them. I’ve learned a lot. I cherish our friendship.

That’s Kasey’s tavern across the street. It’s boarded up windows were transformed into the City of Chicago flag by muralists.

She said that a lot of white colleagues at work have reached out to her since this all started. In her view, some have really wanted to learn something, but others just want to tell her they feel guilty and be done with it. She and I have a lot in common, including the concern that once the protests ebb, nothing will change. We’ve both seen this before. Her number one recommendation about action to take? Vote. Get skin—black or white or brown—in the game. And keep voting. And act locally. Go to dreary public meetings. Pressure your city council, state representatives, and mayors. It’s a slog. But as she put it, “We have to do this from the ground up.”

The other friend leans libertarian. He’s a bigshot corporate lawyer. He wouldn’t like me saying that, but I’m not lying. He’s suspicious of government. He’s nothing if not practical. And his recommendation: Get rid of qualified immunity for police. Of course, it takes a lawyer to make a recommendation like that. He patiently explained the term. Wanna know what qualified immunity is? Do the reading assignment above. (Shorthand: It’s a bad thing, and it dates back to really ugly stuff). I’ve learned a lot from my lawyer friend. I cherish our friendship.

Thanks to neighborhood activists, what was once a parking lot, which was going to be a high rise, is now our little park.

We had this discussion last night. In the park next to our building. Socially distanced. With libations. It was great.

Lots of businesses, and our condo building, are still boarded up. But the boards look better. Muralists have seen to that. Two of our favorite businesses, Sandmeyer’s Bookstore and The Grail Café, were somehow, miraculously, untouched by looters. (BTW, looters and protesters here in Chicago, by what I have been able to judge, are mutually exclusive groups.)

Last week Beth and I had dinner at Sofi, an exquisite Italian restaurant in the first floor of our building. I put on my fancy sport jacket. Beth put on her elegant red dress. Friends saw us and said, “Schnazzy!”

It was the first day of Chicago’s phase III of opening. Sofi started serving at their sidewalk patio by reservation. There are specified seating times. Between them staff wipes down everything.

The waiters were masked, and place settings included packets of hand sanitizer.

It was kind of weird.

It was the best dinner out I’ve ever had.

I am pleased to introduce Bobbie Turner as our featured “Saturdays with Seniors” blogger today. A self-taught artist and award-winning educator, Bobbie grew up on Chicago’s West Side, and after graduating with both a BA and an MA from Roosevelt University she taught children in the creative arts in Chicago’s Rockwell-Maplewood area.

Bobbie was just a teenager when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.was assassinated, and she generously agreed to let us publish a recollection of the looting that erupted in her neighborhood back in 1968.

Compassion in a Box

by Bobbie Turner

People were crying, standing around in disbelief and sorrow as we stood there looking at all the destruction in our close-knit neighborhood. Smoke filled the air. Glass everywhere, fires burning on blocks that once housed shops.

The occasion marked more than the death of a christened leader, but the death of family universal. No trust, betrayal, slaughter, disrespect, visions of slavery, Jim Crow, assassination, starvation, no resources. Ravaged hearts ripped as the bullets all but ripped off the head of a leader, the Drum Major of Peace.

A clip from MLK’s last speech.

“Mr. Louie” as we called Mr. Leonard, the store owner of the only full market facility in our neighborhood, was stunned by the damage. Color was washed from his face, ghostly white. His eyes filled with something, but I didn’t know what it was. Pale purple rose like a fountain; first his hands, then wrist, and after a few moments, his face and head.

“Oh, Mr. Louie, we are so sorry… We tried to stop them…They weren’t from around here… We begged them to stop…Then somebody threw something through the window, and that was it.”

Mr. Louie, a short slightly stocky Jewish man, was one of the kindest persons in our neighborhood. His small grocery store was an oasis, a jewel, our beacon of hope. In short, he fed the people in the area. There was no A & P….no National Foods in our area, just Louie’s, and boy, were we thankful.

I often wondered how Mr. Louie stayed in business; he extended credit to just about everyone. When I made grocery runs for some of my neighbors, they would tell me to tell Mr. Louie to put “it on credit” or give me a balled-up note with a message to pass to him. He would look at the note and start filling the order. Usually, it was a request for sandwich meat and bread.

I marveled as I watched Mr. Louie take out a tin box. This is where he kept his files, credit files on note cards. He would write down the amount that was owed on that person’s card. It was understood that payment would have to be made before the debt was over-extended. Sometimes Mr. Louie would tell them what was owed. The way he told them was with kindness, understanding, and respect. Everybody owed him. Many loved him.

Mr. Louie helped save lives with a tin box full of compassion. On this dreadful night, our neighborhood died along with Mr. Louie’s grocery store. Louie decided not to return.

Life has never been the same.

A photo on Mike’s Monday’s with Mike post this week left friends asking me whether or not Seeing Eye dog Luna has a hard time finding the front door to our apartment building now. Glass doors and windows have been boarded up ever since looters broke into two businesses on the first floor Saturday night.

Our front door is being held open in this shot, but it, too, is covered by wood.

Luna has had a lot to deal with since coming home to Chicago with me from the Seeing Eye school at the end of January, 2020. My broken wrist, sheltering in place, Mike hospitalized with COVID 19, social distancing, us wearing masks, and now…the lootings. She’s been riding the storms magnificently, though; she hasn’t forgotten her lefts and rights, still stops at corners during walks and guides us safely around physical obstacles in our way. And now, with so many neighborhood buildings boarded up and storefronts all looking alike, can she find our door?

Yes.

Luna and I take two long walks a day around the neighborhood, I always wear a mask, and she always guides me right to our boarded-up front door when our walks are over. I’m not so sure she detects it visually, though. My guess is she does it by smell. An article in Wired last year about how difficult its been to come up with a robot with olfactory skills points out how many years ”humans have prized dogs for their tracking abilities” and how “police and armed forces have long used them to sniff out bombs, drugs, and bodies.” Humans rely on vision to navigate the world, the article says, but a dog is motivated by scent. More from the article:

All this adds up to a revelation not just about dogs but about the physical world itself. Smell, it appears, is sometimes the best way of detecting and discriminating between otherwise hidden things out in the world

So while I can’t see the door, and I can’t differentiate one boarded-up building from another by my sense of touch, Luna sniffs it out and leads me to the right door handle every time.

And once we get home, thanks to the bravery and hard work of our condo staff and our terrific condo board president throughout these trials, she and I and Mike can feel safe and sound.

PS: Guide dogs are not trained to stay six feet away from others, and the Seeing Eye has developed anew infogram with suggestions on how to help us social distance and stay safe. Check it out and feel free to share with others — thanks.