I’ve been watching more television than normal during the coronavirus lockdown. Or at least different kinds of TV–in normal times my viewing is limited to sports and cooking shows. All I can say is one part of the economy that the coronavirus would not seem to have slowed is the ad industry.

And is it me, or does it seem like there’s a single ad agency churning out serious corona-themed commercials using one cookie-cutter formula?

It starts with austere, solemn music.

Then a narrator says something like

• In these difficult times…
• In these troubled times…
• In these unprecedented times…

Then it ends with some variation on

We’re here for you and we still want to sell you stuff.

Apart from the one-size-fits-all Coronavirus themed spots,  there are a lot of personal injury law firms trying to get us to sue somebody.

And scads of pharmaceutical ads. Which, collectively, make me wonder: Who makes up the names of these drugs?

Otezla? Rexulti? Really?

All I can say is thank God for the 1990s Chicago Bulls and the Last Dance documentary on ESPN. When that’s over, this lockdown better be over, too.

I am pleased to introduce Barbara Hayler as our featured “Saturdays with Seniors” blogger today. Born and raised in California, Barbara moved to Springfield, Illinois in her forties to accept a position as Professor of Criminal Justice at University of Illinois-Springfield. She moved to Admiral at the Lake in Chicago when she retired, and is now putting her experience in academia to work, generously volunteering to lead the weekly memoir-writing class there in my abstentia as we shelter in place. Here’s the nostalgic essay Barbara wrote when given the prompt “A Change in Habit.” Enjoy!

Before Computers, There Were Typewriters

by Barbara Haylor

As a child I thought typewriters were exclusively business machines. Then I discovered that we had one in our home. Mom used it to prepare meeting agendas and minutes when she was President of the PTA. She typed up recipe cards to accompany her dishes to church potlucks, and sometimes even used it to write letters. But most of the time it was stored in a closet, tucked away on a rolling typing stand. When I was ten I moved the family Remington into my bedroom and taught myself to type.

I was horse-mad that year. I followed all the horses that were in contention for the Kentucky Derby, tracking their success in preliminary races through the spring. The races were covered in Sports Illustrated, which I checked out from the library. I couldn’t tear those articles out to save, so I typed out copies. I became quite adept at two-finger typing, but didn’t learn to type properly until I took a class in high school. My mother thought every girl should have a skill to fall back on “just in case.”

I did so well that my typing teacher thought I could have a great career as an executive secretary, and tried to track me into business math and shorthand classes. My mother put a stop to that. “This is a useful skill,” she told him, “but no vocational classes.” “Barbara’s going to college.”

Three of my siblings had left home for college before me, and my parents sent each of us off with a good desk lamp and a typewriter. Handwritten assignments were acceptable in high school, but college required a typewriter. Mine was a gorgeous green Hermes portable typewriter, probably the best typewriter I’ve ever had. I later learned that it was a favorite of war correspondents because it was all metal and could take a lot of damage.

The study abroad program I went on during my freshman year at Lewis & Clark Colege in Portland, Oregon provided typewriters, so I didn’t take my Hermes with me when I went to France. I soon learned that instead of the standard QWERTY keyboard, French typewriters have something called the AZERTY keyboard. The “A” and the “Q” switch places, as do the “Z” and the “W.” This is supposed to facilitate typing in French (where Q is used much more often than in English) but it wreaks havoc on a touch typist who is used to typing without thinking. Just about the time I got comfortable with the French keyboard, I returned to the U.S. and had to relearn touch typing all over again.

Eventually my Hermes broke down, and no one could fix it. I flirted with a variety of alternatives: an electric portable that was prone to overheating, a variable spacing typewriter that I never got the hang of, a Selectric with that amazing bouncing ball, a memory typewriter that could erase up to a line of type on command. But they were mere machines.

I wrote my entire dissertation in pencil on yellow pads, but of course, it eventually had to be typed. That’s when I made the acquaintance of the dedicated Word Processing machine in the main office. State-of-the-art in 1984, it ran a now-obsolete program called VolksWriter and used 5” floppy discs the size of plates. When you inserted the floppy discs into a large reader that we called “the Toaster,” the screen displayed green letters on a dark background. Sometimes, after hours of typing a dissertation chapter into the machine, I would go home with visions of red letters on a light background dancing in front of my eyes.

My first personal computer was a generic Acer PC. Thirty-five years later, I have a Dell desktop that is slightly larger than the “Toaster,” with a thousand times more computing power. I have gotten used to composing on the computer, and love the ability to edit on the fly. But I’ve also had to get used to more typos, courtesy of autocorrect, and the autocratic rule of Bill Gates, whose Word program insists that “cancelled” is spelled with one “l.” I still sometimes write first drafts on yellow pads, but I got rid of my last typewriter – a portable Olivetti– when I moved to Chicago.

God help me if the power ever goes out!

A friend just sent an email asking for my advice. Subject line? “How do you recognize a smile when you can’t see the face?”

Starting today, May 1, 2020, Illinois residents are required to wear masks in any public situation where we are unable to keep a six-foot distance from others. My friend understands the necessity to wear masks, but it’s all bumming her out. “You know me,” she wrote. “When I’m out doing errands, I amuse myself by trying to amuse others.” What now?  How will she know her jokes are funny if she can’t see people smiling?

Under normal circumstances (remember those?!) I can hear a smile in someone’s voice. That skill didn’t come automatically when I lost my sight. They didn’t teach us that at Braille Jail, either. I had to figure it out on my own, and that took time.

I wasn’t blind long before discovering how much I’d relied on lip reading to communicate back when I could see. Lip-reading, and body language, too. You see a person look at you, maybe give you a nod, and start moving their lips? Odds are they are talking to you. Now, sometimes, I don’t have a clue.

Any of you who have been seated on a barstool next to me (remember when we used to do that?) has inevitably witnessed my difficulties in addressing the bartender. I hear one come near, they ask, “Ready for another one?” and I assume they are talking to me. If they’re not, and I respond? Awkward.

Ditto those times when a pharmacist, a bank teller, a post office clerk, a TSA employee, a ticket counter worker (actually, any circumstance where I have to stand in line) calls out, “you’re next.” After inadvertently cutting in line hundreds of times, I finally figured out to point at myself and ask, “Me?” before making a move.

And then there’s the time Mike and I sat down at a bar we didn’t frequent much and I asked a bartender what they had on draft. Little did I know I was sitting smack dab in front of all the beer pulls. The bartender pointed at the pulls (I think) and said, “What are you, blind?”

Good guess.

But back to smiles. When I first started recording essays for NPR, radio pros there encouraged me to smile while talking on the radio. “A smile comes through even when you can’t see the person who is smiling,” they said. “Even if you are saying something that isn’t exactly funny, you should smile: it engages listeners.” After that I started hearing smiles on the radio. (For a good example of a radio announcer who smiles when reading announcements, ask your smartspeaker to “play WBEZ” in the afternoon and listen to our local All Things Considered host Melba Lara — she’s always smiling, and always engaging).

It wasn’t long before I could detect smiles in everyday life, too. When I’m not quite sure? I can always turn to Mike. “Does Emily have a pretty smile?” I might ask. “She always sounds like she’s smiling.”

With many states requiring masks in public now, voices are going to be muffled, lip-reading will be impossible, judging whether people are addressing us is going to be more difficult. So how can my friend know someone is smiling without being able to see their face? With no evidence to the contrary, just picture they are.

Years ago I got the camera bug in a photojournalism class—I shot with department-issued cameras, spent hours in the J-school darkroom, and eventually bought my own SLR camera. I take snaps with my iPhone, but every once in awhile, the phone just falls short. It was a hobby that eventually fell by the wayside.

A longtime neighborhood friend, Anthony, whom we met at Hackney’s way back when, is, among many other things, an excellent and knowledgeable photographer. I started picking his gigantic brain (he’s a linguist, a computer programmer, and lots of other brainy things) about cameras back when we could still chat on barstools. He generously offered to loan me one of his cameras and a fantastic lens—I was a little nervous about taking possession of such a nice outfit. But when he showed up at Half Sour, our local haunt, one evening and handed me a nifty canvas bag containing the camera and necessary accessories, I couldn’t say no.

Well, a lot’s changed since I shot black-and-white Kodak Tri-X Pan and dodged and burned in the darkroom. Yeesh, the features on these things. They’re like Transformers. The lockdown started shortly after Anthony lended me the camera, and I’ve entertained myself by reading endless online reviews cameras, poring over the owner’s manual for Anthony’s camera, trying to fathom everything these new-fangled machines can do.

Over these past weeks, I’ve pestered Anthony with email questions that I would’ve normally asked in person before the shutdown—and he’s patiently answered all of them. Then last week he suggested that I shoot with a different focal length lens to experience the difference. He outlined a precisely choreographed plan for exchanging lenses while maintaining social distancing. (Wouldn’t George Carlin have a good time with that term? Or “shelter in place”?)

Yesterday, on a lovely, mostly sunny spring day, we executed the plan.

“I’m at Dearborn Park,” read his email.

“I’ll be there in minutes,” I replied.

Anthony has become a friend of the squirrels at Dearborn Park, a lovely little verdant oasis in the middle of our concrete jungle. He feeds them hazelnuts, which he buys in bulk just for this purpose, he photographs them, he tells stories about them. He’s like the squirrel whisperer.

And holy cow, as I approached, squirrels were everywhere! None wore masks but all were well behaved.

We stood strides apart, he in a patterned fabric mask, me in one of the masks I’d been sent home with from the hospital after my Covid19 scare. He took his current camera out of his bag. He demonstrated how to remove the lens—noting that it worked the exact same way on my loaner.

He put the lens caps on front and back.

“Your turn,” he said.

I took out my camera, pressed the release button on the front of the camera, just as Anthony had on his. I twisted off the lens, and attached the caps.

Anthony placed his lens on a nearby concrete table.

I retrieved the lens and left my lens on the table.

Anthony retrieved that lens.

We bundled up our bags and said adieu to one another and to the squirrels.

Interesting times.

José with his wife, Kate .

I am pleased to introduce José DiMauro as our featured “Saturdays with Seniors” blogger today. Born in Argentina, José graduated from medical school at Univ De Buenos Aires and left home in 1963 to start his medical career at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital., From there he became a board certified pathologist at University of Illinois in Chicago, and after retiring, Dr. DiMauro moved with his wife Kate to Admiral at the Lake, where I lead a weekly memoir-writing class. While we all shelter in place, that class is meeting virtually, assigning prompts on their own and meeting and sharing their work via Zoom. Here’s what José came up with earlier this month when the prompt was “Locked In.”

by José DeMauro

The year 2020 started well for us. Winter had been relatively mild in Chicago, and in mid-January, Kate and I were still exulting from our recent vacation to Belize. It was the end of January before I first heard the word “Wuhan.”

That word made me think of a silk-road tale, but to figure out where Whuhan was, I had to search Google Maps. A novel flu-like disease was a growing concern there, but that was at the other side of the world! I didn’t pay much attention.

But then, news of the virus started to multiply…and it was moving west, fast,…Iran…Italy…. As the novel flu-like disease started taking more space on the front-page news, it also started mutating names: coronavirus, CODV-19, SARS-CoV-2. At our safe abode, the Admiral at the Lake, March brought a different sort of “Madness.” On the 5th of March we had an instructive presentation of what still seemed to be at a relatively safe distance. But then, things accelerated, and we had to learn a new vocabulary fast:

• On the 9th of March, we went into “Soft Shutdown”
• On the 12th of March, we “Hardened the shutdown process”
• On the 16th of March we were locked in our apartments for “Prevention and protection”
• On the 18th of March we started to “Shelter in place”
• Finally, on the 21st of March, at the illogical hour for “seniors” of 6 AM, we rushed to Mariano’s across the street for supplies..but no toilet paper
• On Wednesday the 25th, the weather brought one of its rare gifts to Chicago: a temperature of 60 º. Kate and I ventured for a walk along a rapidly-crowding Chicago lakefront, trying to keep our six-foot distance from others. On our return walk, we noticed a helicopter hovering in place and a sudden proliferation of police squad cars. That day Mayor Lightfoot threatened to shut down the lakefront due to overcrowding there. She did just that the next day, and we felt guilty, as if we had caused it just by being outside taking a walk.

Being introverted, I don’t mind being locked-in, I cherish free time to catch-up with my readings. Truth is, I like to be alone.

But in a rapidly interconnected world, we’re in this together. When the virus hit Italy and Spain, the calls began. My parents were born and raised in Italy, then emigrated to Argentina in search of better opportunities. I grew up in Buenos Aires, became a U.S. citizen in 1971, I still have cousins in Rome and Southern Italy, and one of my nephews lives in Valencia, Spain. With many relatives in those hard-hit areas, my cell phone WhatsApp was lightning fast and furious. Fortunately, all my relatives were well, and I really enjoyed getting back in touch with them.

I then took refuge at my computer. The monitor soon filled with well-intentioned friends who decided that I was bored and needed entertainment. What was this? Had my computer been hijacked by a virus, too?!

Now, our lives have settled around waiting for the morning ring alerting us to check our temperature, and the 4 PM ring that announces dinner is at the door. Going down four floors to pick up the mail has become the walk of the day, and once we return, we wash our hands…again. More than ever, we are grateful for our east-looking full wall windows. They bring the light and lake to us. Early on this month, however, we noticed something amiss. Here it was, rush-hour, and Lake Shore Drive, the drive along the lake, was eerily empty. We felt desolate.

But then, we noticed something else. The tree foliage was already turning a timid green. April was starting to creep in, although, we suspected, it didn’t know where it was going yet.