This photo was displayed on the big screen while Wanda’s StoryCorps conversation was playing, the two of us are always happy to be together, can you tell? Photo courtesy StoryCorps.

Couldn’t make it to the Chicago Cultural Center to hear writer Wanda Bridgeforth at StoryCorps Live: The Greatest Generation last Friday? Don’t despair! Now you can hear the five-minute excerpt they played online. One thing you’ll miss out on by listening at home is the positive energy in the room during Friday’s event. Ask anyone who was there (more people came than I’d anticipated!) and they’ll tell you. During the audience discussion afterwards a woman said, “It felt like a live history lesson!”

She was right.

As host, my job was to welcome the audience and introduce each of the six short excerpts selected from conversations with people over age 90recorded at the StoryBooth in the Chicago Cultural Center. Listening to their stories taught us a lot about Chicago history. You can link here to listen to all six stories, and among those five-minute excerpts of recorded conversations you’ll hear a Japanese-American man explaining to his son and granddaughter why his first job in Chicago, working graveyard shift at Oscar Mayer Meat Company, lasted only two months. . “One night an army colonel came walking through and spotted me. He told Oscar May’rs to ‘get rid of those Japs,’ so we were fired immediately.” In another conversation a woman tells her son about working in a laboratory at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and discovering later that her work was part of the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. “I didn’t know we were working on a bomb!” she tells him. “I had no idea.” Some people in the audience Friday gasped when they heard Wanda non-chalantly describe boundaries she grew up with on Chicago’s South Side. “We were blocked in,” she said. “We knew not to cross Cottage Grove, 51st Street or the train tracks. That was our neighborhood.” As a kid, if she crossed east on Cottage Grove Avenue a “policeman would come out of nowhere, ask where you were going and escort you right back across the street.”

Audience members stayed afterwards to enjoy a free lunch, talk with each other and meet the featured nonagenarians and their family members in person — Wanda’s daughter, Wanda, Jr., was there, too!

As I write this blog post, it occurs to me that maybe hearing StoryCorps Live helped people there feel less self-conscious? They sure sounded more open to conversation with others they didn’t know. The audience discussion afterwards was lively, it provided me with ideas for writing prompts for 2020 memoir-writing classes, no one hogged the microphone, we all seemed intent on, guess what? Listening.

I overheard dozens of conversations around me as my sister Cheryl and her daughter, my niece Janet, guided Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me out once the event was over. The two of them had surprised me by taking the train in from the suburbs to see Wanda (one of their favorites) and watch me host the event.

Janet is ten years younger than I am, she knows me well, and I have always been able to count on her to be painfully honest with me. “You were pretty nervous at first, I could tell,” she reported as we said our thanks and goodbyes to all the writers in my memoir classes who’d come from all over the city to be there. “But you got better,” she added.

Janet was right, of course. I did get better Friday, and I wasn’t alone: everyone there did! You can’t help but get better when listening to the Greatest Generation.

Many many thanks to Crystal Warren, Regional Director at Renaissance Court for letting StoryCorps Chicago know about the writers over age 90 in our memoir-writing class there, and to Amy Tardif, Regional Manager of the Chicago StoryBooth for listening! Bill Healy, the great guy who produces StoryCorps conversations for WBEZ was at Friday’s event and the StoryCorps staff members were a huge help in making it all go so smoothly: thank you Mary Bess Ser, Rocío Santos, Olivia Lindsley, Laura Saenz, and Juanpablo Ramirez. Link here to participate in the Great Thanksgiving Listen tomorrow and add your own story to the StoryCorps archive, too.

I wasn’t able to watch the impeachment hearings live, but I have seen selected highlights. Beth was able to listen to some morning testimony live, and she sort of helped me seek out things she thought were significant.

In doing so, she had a take on it all I hadn’t expected: Regardless of the president’s behavior, whether it rose to impeachable, or anything else political, she was inspired.

I didn’t really get it until I listened to parts of the State Department folks. When I did, I understood. These people, despite what anyone wants to smear them as, are true public servants. A lot of their testimony served as a sort of civics lesson in just what the heck the diplomatic corps does. The answer is, a lot, and under very difficult circumstances, working for very different leaders every few years.

We live in an age when skepticism about government has grown from healthy to malignant. Hard scrutiny about the limits of what government does, and oversight of government—local, state, and federal—is absolutely a good thing.

But dissing every one and every thing in the government is a cop out. It abdicates the whole idea that we hold some responsibility for the conduct of our government. It doesn’t delineate between the things government can and should do, and those things that perhaps, despite the best intentions, aren’t practical. As such, we get into binary thinking—all good, or all bad. And we never have the constructive conversation and debate.

I once worked at a wine importer and distributor, and one of the women I worked with was whip-smart, she had gone to Princeton, was making a good buck, and…she decided to join the Peace Corps. After that experience, she joined the State Department, and has repeatedly moved to points around the globe for her work. She’s now in the United Arab Emirates, reviewing visa requests to visit the United States. Not an unimportant task in that part of the world.

She’s proud of her work, completely apolitical in her observations about it, and I’m glad she’s on the case.

There are a lot of good people in government—we heard a few of them testify last week, and thanks to my friend in the UAE, I know it for a fact.

Drivers running red lights. Drivers causing gridlock. Drivers texting. Drivers watching TV on their phones. Pedestrians walking and texting or reading their phone. Bicyclists who don’t use those bike lanes we gave them. Pedestrians who walk in bike lanes. People who buy a damn plastic vest and slap it on their ill-trained dog and fake that it’s a legitimate service dog. People who let their dogs pee anywhere.

Sometimes people get on my nerves. And it’s beyond annoyance–lots of this stuff is dangerous. Last year was the worst for pedestrian fatalities in decades. This despite inroads on reducing drunk driving, cars that stop themselves and correct their courses themselves. There isn’t a smart automotive device that can make up for our stupidity sometimes.

I have this dream. A superhero who swoops down and smites people at just the instant they commit these various offenses. OK, maybe not smites them, but scares the bajeezus out of them. Something like what I experienced growing up—just about the instant I did or said something stupid, my mom was somehow right there and she’d thump the top of my head with her finger—as if if she was testing the ripeness of a melon. It didn’t really hurt but man it got my attention.

Anyway, I’d call the superhero BM Man or BM Woman. As in Behavior Modification.

Just think. Traffic would move better, walking wouldn’t be an adventure, dogs would only go where they should, we’d all learn to live in fear in of BM Woman and consequently, treat each other lots better than we do.

I see a graphic novel here.

The suggestion box is open.

Anyone who has followed our Safe & Sound blog for a while knows who Wanda Bridgeforth is. You’ve seen her photo here. You’ve read her writing here. But do you know what she sounds like? Now’s your chance!

Earlier this month I spent an hour with Wanda in a StoryCorps booth in Chicago (aside from their studio in New York City, StoryCorps has two satellite sites: one in Atlanta and the other in Chicago). While there is no guarantee Wanda’s interview will air nationally on NPR, I can tell you this: a short excerpt of the conversation Wanda and I recorded will air at a special StoryCorps event in Chicago this Friday. How do I know this, you ask? Because I’ve been selected to host the event!

I know. I didn’t believe it when they asked me, either. But check out this official invitation from StoryCorps:

StoryCorps Live: The Greatest Generation

Since StoryCorps Chicago first opened in 2013, more than 200 people aged 90 and above from the Chicago community have visited us to record their stories and memories. Join us for a public event featuring excerpts of these recordings, plus audience discussion and refreshments. Hosted by author, teacher, and journalist Beth Finke.
WHEN: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 11am

WHERE: Renaissance Court, our neighbors in the Chicago Cultural Center, at 78 E Washington Street. (Accessible entrance at 77 E Randolph.)

Selected interviews have been edited down to five-minute pieces, I’ve been given bios of the nonagenarians interviewed in those, and I’ll be introducing their pieces at the event. Among others, you’ll be hearing from a Japanese-American man who talks of internment camps in the 1940s; a woman whose work at a University of Chicago lab in the 1940s was part of the Manhattan Project; a Hyde Park resident who talks about the complexities of growing up in early 20th century with a white mother and a black father; and a fabulous writer we all know who relives her memories growing up in Chicago’s lively Bronzeville neighborhood.

That last member of the Greatest Generation is, of course, our 98-year-old Wanda. Snacks and refreshments will be served at the event, an ASL interpreter will be on hand, and the event is free. All you have to do is RSVP online here or phone Renaissance Court at 312.744.4550 to let them know you’re coming. Look for me there — next thing you know, I’ll be hosting the Oscars.

Communication technology breakthroughs have always been scary and disruptive—the invention of the printing press, to name one, was considered an enormous threat to the of order of the day. As were inventions like the telephone and television.

The technologies themselves have never been good or evil per se. It’s the behavior of  people who use the technologies that are good or evil. The current technological power may be unprecedented, but really, in terms of the hill we humans have to constantly climb regarding behavior and ethics remains the same.

Take Twitter. In my lifetime, by my view, we’ve always had an analog version of it: bumper stickers. A car whizzes by, or sits there parked; the sticker—a virtual middle finger—reads “I’m right, you’re wrong,” later! Oh sure, Twitter is theoretically “interactive,” but really, online forums don’t invite true conversations; they enable us to chuck spears back and forth. Unless we decide not to.

And Facebook? Sure, there’s good (outside of its corporate behavior). But the analog to the bad in Facebook, to me, has always been the Christmas letter. Or at least some Christmas letters (I’m not a total Grinch). The ones from people we’re out of touch with that detail everything from kids’ test scores to bouts with IBS. If you’re in my inner circle and I’m in yours, I’d already know. If not, and you just want to say you’re thinking of someone, well, that’s where Christmas cards come in.

What got me thinking about all this was a piece in The Atlantic on the difference between grieving and mourning in the age of social media. The author had lost her young sister to cancer. And she observed what happened online in the aftermath—it wasn’t all good. In the piece she does not condemn social media, but invites participants to think about what they’re doing in times of other people’s loss. The basic idea is that there are people grieving a terrible loss, and what you do in mourning online can help or hurt. Or perhaps, best, do nothing.

She starts by describing a modern phenomenon: Learning on social media that someone died. Here’s a taste of her phenomenally well written and considered piece:

The morning after my sister Lauren died was cold and quiet, a mid-March prairie dawn, lit by gray half-light. For several hours I tried to figure out how to get out of bed. The most routine tasks are extraordinarily difficult in the early days of grief—Lauren’s death had torn a hole in my universe, and I knew the moment I moved I would fall right through it. Meanwhile, across the city, a former classmate of Lauren’s learned of her death. I’m still not sure how—she hadn’t kept in touch with Lauren during the three years since they graduated high school. But bad news travels astonishingly fast. The classmate selected what is perhaps the only picture of the two of them together, and decided to post it on Lauren’s timeline. Beneath it, she wrote “RIP” and something about heaven gaining an angel.

This Facebook post is how many of Lauren’s close friends learned that she had died. We—her family—hadn’t yet been able to call people. The first post sparked a cascade of statuses and pictures, many from people who barely knew her. It was as though an online community felt the need to claim a stake in her death, through syrupy posts that profoundly misrepresented who she was and sanitized what had happened to her.

The author goes on to spotlight the important difference between mourning, which is a public act, and grieving, which is private and internal. She doesn’t condemn social media outright, and acknowledges that it may be valuable in terms of shared mourning. (BTW, I came to find the article via…social media.) She just says let’s be careful and thoughtful out there.

She concludes with this advice about how to behave on social media in the wake of a death:

My proposal is simple: Wait. If the deceased is not a close family member, do not take it upon yourself to announce their death online. Consider where you fall in the geography of a loss, and tailor your behavior in response to the lead of those at the center. Listen. Rather than assuming the bereaved are ready for (or comfortable with) Facebook or Twitter tributes, send a private message, or even better, pick up the phone and call.

If you don’t feel comfortable expressing your condolences to the deceased’s friends and family, perhaps it isn’t your place to publicly eulogize.

I’m going to heed that advice, and hope you will, too. I also hope you’ll read the entire piece.