Toilet troubles worsened by COVID crisis

     Tim Pyle, executive director of the American Restroom Association, recently got an urgent email from Wichita alerting him that the bathroom at the bus station downtown was closed to the public; could the ARA help?
     While the Baltimore-based group is not intended to address individual shuttered toilets across this great land, Pyle responded sympathetically.
     “Municipalities and governments have dropped the ball in the past 20 years, and have abdicated their responsibilities to store owners, gas stations, and eateries,” he wrote. “Now that COVID has hit, it is more important than ever for ‘public’ facilities to do their part and keep them open.”
     Which is separate from the issue of whether people should even go into public restrooms that are open. Public bathrooms are perfect virus spreaders. Strangers gather in the smallest space possible. They perform functions that are then rendered into whirling vortexes of airborne contamination, thanks to flushing toilets, and blasted through the room by hand dyers.
     Two related problems then: keeping bathrooms open, and improving their safety.
     “When you think about delivery drivers, folks on the road, if there aren’t bathrooms available because everything is closed, where are they supposed to go?” Pyle said. “What COVID has done is highlighted weaknesses in the restroom infrastructure.”
     Well, that, along with highlighting the fault lines spider-webbing through every aspect of American society: health care, government, the economy, as well as the cracks latticing the heads of many of our fellow citizens, who can’t seem to grasp the whole wash-your-hands-and-wear-a-mask thing until they themselves are, you know, dying. The psychology of bathrooms adds another layer of difficulty.

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Bebb Oak

     Business required me to observe a variety of outdoor tasks Wednesday morning: water being pumped, asphalt poured, sewers sluiced, leaks detected, drain pipe laid. Which probably doesn't sound fun to you, but which was very fun for me, both because of the unexpected and thus interesting details of the processes, and the friendly, open nature of all the workers I spoke with. I'd share some of those details, but I don't want to deflate the story I have coming later. You'll just have to trust me.
     Though I can share this, since it isn't part of my story. Just to show that these few hours of fun could be topped, my host was kind enough to swing me by something I had heard about but never seen—the oldest tree in Northbrook, a Bebb Oak on Sunset that is easily as old as our country and probably older—perhaps as much as 400 years old.
    It was a magnificent tree, filling the sky and I struggled to find a vantage to see the thing in anything near its entirety. The Bebb Oak is the official Village Tree of Northbrook, a hybrid between a burr oak (quercus macrocarpa) and a white oak (quercus alba), and I spent a long time contemplating it from various angles.
    I should just leave it there, but there is one hanging obvious question—it is an obvious question, is it not? C'mon, work with me here. Well hanging for me, and I had to check it out, and might as well tell you. Apologies in advance.
    "Bebb." What kind of word is that? The Oxford gave me nothing, so I poked online, which is cheating, yes, but works.
    One hint is the Bebb oak's scientific name, quercus×bebbiana. Quercus is Latin for "oak," obviously but bebbiana is pseudo-Latin for the name Bebb—Michael Shuck Bebb to be exact, a 19th century systemic botanist. 
     Turns out he was a hometown lad, blown here from Ohio, tramping around Chicago in the 1840s and various locales around the state. Most of the biographical information on him was about his work with willows, salix bebbiana, but I pressed on, being rather systematic myself, and soon stumbled upon a letter of Bebb's to George Clinton—the botanist, not the singer from Parliament-Funkadelic—dated Sept. 23, 1873:      

     I have just found two or three splendid hybrid Oaks between Quercus alba & macrocarpa and I am not altogether sure that I have hit upon the explanation of the “miniature fruit” of olivaeformis Michx.
     How I wish I lived within reach of a large library and a large Herbarium.

      Well, there you have it. Not the most urgent issue—that required phone interviews all afternoon, for Friday's column, so you'll have to wait on that too. Which leaves us after dinner—falafel, fries and spiced carrots from Misrahi Grill enjoyed al fresco at the Botanic Garden, so it really was a full day—with nothing more profound than one glorious tree. Which should be profundity aplenty, but in case it falls short, as I suspect it might, I would direct your attention to the last line of my excerpt of Bebb's letter, where he is in the field, pining for books and a collection of dried plants to check his samples against. Since all of us have within reach the largest library and an endless herbarium at our fingertips 24 hours a day, we should pause, shake off the long familiarity that has dulled us to its wonder, and be amazed and grateful anew. 

    

If we’re in hell, we might as well read Dante

Dante in the Piazza Santa Croce, Florence.

     John Took’s new book “Dante” is very heavy lifting. From the first sentence — “Exemplary in respect of just about everything coming next on the banks of the Arno over the next few decades was the case of Buondelmonte de’Buondelmonti on the threshold of the thirteenth century.” — it is a waist-deep slog through the muddiest of academic creeks.
     Pressing forward, I grew to hate him. Just for taking something so valuable and rendering it into turgid academic blather. Grew to hate Princeton University Press for foisting this upon a trusting public. Hate the scholars who blurbed it. “A beautiful book that reflects decades of thinking and teaching,” begins literary critic Piero Boitani.
     Maybe he meant the cover. It is indeed a beautiful cover.
     And I grew to hate myself for buying the book, impulsively, because, heck, it has such a nice cover and it is about Dante. For insisting on grimly, joylessly grinding through it, page after page, trying to glean some shred of knowledge from this field of chaff. I blame my own cheapness. I bought the thing, paid, geez, $35 for it. I have to read it. It grew to feel like penance, a hair shirt. Enduring a homebound summer in a brainless era during the reign of an imbecile? Here’s some grist for the mill, perfesser. Chew on this!
     Then on page 333 (ironically, since three is very big in Dante’s Commedia), he makes it all worthwhile. A redemptive Hail Mary pass, fittingly. He’s categorizing the ways the human vessel is deformed in “Inferno”: stuffed into fissures in rocks, soothsayers’ heads twisted backward “in a grim parody of their profession,” barrators sunk in molten pitch, “the most atrocious kind of metamorphosis.”
     Then Took reaches back and unleashes this perfect spiral:

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Murderers' Row

     It is good to have many news sources, and many voices commenting within those sources. Because while news is infinite, the attention span of readers is not. Someone needs to frame the most relevant parts of everything that's going on, trimming the fat and serving the meat. Deciding what to keep in, what to leave out.
     For instance. On Monday my esteemed former colleague and current friend Robert Feder wrote one of his typically thoughtful and comprehensive items about the Tribune cashiering a columnist in the wake of his latest aping of Fox News fever fantasy. He'll now be kept isolated, for his own good and ours, in some sort of opinion pen that the Tribune is erecting for its columnists at the back of the paper.
     Feder quotes Tribune editor-in-chief Colin McMahon, saying, in essence, that Trib readers are too dim-witted to differentiate between news and opinion.
     “The Tribune, like a lot of news media, doesn’t do a very good job of explaining the difference between news coverage and opinion writing" he told Feder. "That is something we’ve been working to address."
     I bet they have. But I don't know how opinion could be any more clearly marked. You'd think the mug shots would be a giveaway. Yes, certain readers can't wrap their heads around the difference between stories, columns and editorials, just as some readers can't differentiate between real life and what they were told last night by Sean Hannity. But gearing your publication for America's Confused Third is a race to the bottom that Fox has already won. They've cornered that market. For a newspaper, that's like deciding to aim your news at readers who can't read, using a felt board and brightly-colored circles, squares and triangles representing the news of the day. Open can, heat soup.
     Feder's emphasis on the supposed big dog having his face held in his mess starts with the headline: "Tribune moving John Kass column ‘to maintain credibility of news coverage’ 

    But in doing so, Feder downplays the really important part. As a Tribune subscriber, the fate of this particular columnist means nothing to me. Years go by without my ever feeling a tickle of an inclination to read a Kass column. I hurry on, grateful for that run-the-guy's-photo warning system whose significance apparently eludes many.
     Though not always. Over the weekend, hearing the cry of agony reverberating from Twitter, I approached the controversial column, haltingly, the way you would reach into a dark space to see if there were snakes. It was ... I can't say for certain; I was squinting and skimming toward the end, as one does with him. He seems to be agitated by the supposed connection of Jewish financier George Soros with Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, as best I could tell before my eyes completely glazed over.

     It was almost peaceful. A kind of drown reflex.  I wasn't distressed. Just the opposite; I admired his restraint. He managed to leave out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—that couldn't have been easy for him—and there was no caricature of a fanged, hook-nosed Jew sprouting octopus tentacles straddling globe that usually goes along with this kind of stuff. Maybe the Tribune graphics desk spiked that. It is a team effort.
     I don't see what the fuss is about. This is what these revanchist loons do, make these crazy juxtapositions. When Rush Limbaugh went after me for suggesting assault rifles are dangerous, I recall that Kim Kardashian was somehow involved in his analysis. That's why this stuff is ultimately so ignorable. It isn't shocking. It can't be, because it's all the same. It's so dumb it's dull.
    No, the part in Feder's report that stood out to me as most significant, though lost in all the hoo-haw over the Trib's waxwork Royko manqué melting down, is that the Trib's puppeteer, Alden Capital, is pushing all columnists back in the paper, into some kind of columnist's pasture. It isn't that John Kass was bad now the whole class has to stay after school. This was, as Feder does mention, in the works for months. John Kass channeling Der Stürmer is merely the pretext to set the plan in motion. 

    That's very dire, this separation of columnists, maybe because it resonates with their past efforts at other papers. The Alden thinking goes: why are we paying six figures for these employees to dole out scoops from their wordhoard, when the communication directors of the National Federation  of Community Councils Institute will write weekly columns for free? Are those not also agglutinations of verbiage we can present to the mindless eyeballs we consider our audience? If they're too dumb to distinguish a column from a news story, it won't matter if we give them work of a columnist, or thinly-disguised, self-serving PR pap from some paid-by-somebody-else mouthpiece? To me, the forced removal of opinion writers from their homes throughout the paper, and trucking them to a walled-off neighborhood is the first step toward their elimination. 

     That's a shame, because the only reason to read the Tribune is for their non-Kass columnists: Eric Zorn, easily the best news columnist in Chicago; his Pulitzer-Prize winning musical pal, Mary Schmich; the venerable, all-seeing-eye of Rick Kogan; the sharp and funny Rex Huppke; incisive Steve Chapman; knowledgable and passionate Blair Kamin—I could go on, but I wouldn't want any Alden beancounters to see this, clack their long fingernails together and think, "That's sooooo many mouths to feed!" Alden adheres to what I call the Bean Soup Theory of Journalism. You're handing over the bowls with one hand, collecting the cash with the other, and you look down into a bowl and muse, "My, that's a lot of beans. I could pluck a few out and it would still be bean soup." Eventually, you get down to three beans and nobody wants to pay money for it anymore. Because readers want a hearty soup. They deserve it.
     We had that sort of boss at the Sun-Times a couple decades ago. And now that I think of it, the columnists were all herded toward the back of the bus then too, for a while. But that changed. One of the glories of working at a newspaper and not being A Big Deal is you get to stick around, head down, under the radar, unnoticed in the shadows, and outlive all the folly playing out at the top. Pod systems are rolled out, complex flow charts, trendy fashions indulged, spanking new ideas bruited by gleaming new editors during their brief transits across the sky. Their big plans crash soundlessly somewhere distant, a puff on the horizon, the new programs are forgotten, and we plebes race back to the joyful grind of putting out a newspaper for another day.

     Okay, I've nattered on enough. Time to wind this up. I've delivered my criticism, I should mention, there was a very true note worth highlighting in what Feder wrote:
     "Besides, as insiders pointed out, the days of the 'lead columnist' ended at most major newspapers years ago. Now it’s about a range of voices."
      I could quibble with the "now" in that last sentence. Ever since I joined the paper, 33 years ago, the Sun-Times has always been a range of voices. The lead columnist is whoever is worth the front page, or page two, that day. Sometimes it's me, usually it's not, and that's the way I like it. There's a strain in being up front, and given the kind of look-a-squirrel triviality I revel in—"Where's my Fresca?"—I'm grateful there are usually half a dozen folks coping with the significant stuff. 

    I always view the columnists at the Sun-Times—and God, this is a little embarrassing to admit, but heck, that never stopped me before—as being like the Murderers' Row lineup of the 1927 Yankees, like those old baseball cards with a group of one team's sluggers sighting down their bats, showing off their power. Maybe because writing a column is in fact such a solitary job—your thoughts, your words, your face, your responsibility—I fancy myself as part of a line-up. One person can't win a game or put out a newspaper. You need batter after batter to come up and swing. Everyone on the team has to play their best, because the stars sometimes strike out. And the bench warmer sometimes gets a clutch hit. 
    You have no idea. To be kneeling on deck, and look back at the dugout and see Mark Brown and Mary Mitchell, Rick Telander and Richard Roeper, Lee Bey, Maureen O'Donnell, Rick Morrisey, Dave Roeder, Maudlyne Ihejerika, Stefano Esposito, Laura Washington, Marlen Garcia, Phil Kadner and S.E. Cupp—there's more but you get the idea—to see them laughing and spitting and chugging Gatorade, waiting their turn at the plate. To be on that team in Chicago, that's a wonderful feeling, one that will never show up in Alden Capital's ledger books.  

Let Chicago teach you to ride a bicycle

  
   Karlla Guirola grew up in El Salvador during the war. Alex Raynor was raised in Houston. Bryce Polk is 6 years old.
     Widely diverse upbringings that nevertheless brought the three together in two important ways.
     First, it put them in an elite group: the 6% of Americans who cannot ride a bike. OK, when Raynor was growing up in Texas, she could ride, she says, but couldn’t turn or brake, two skills that complicate bike riding in their absence.
     And second, the three comprised the entire class of attendees who showed up at 6 p.m. a few Thursdays back for a Chicago Department of Transportation “Learn to Ride” free bicycling class for adults. (Bryce, being 6, would seem to be too young to qualify; but in that marvelously adaptive quality that city programs sometimes display, nobody seemed to notice or care, and I certainly wasn’t about to point it out.)
     I can ride a bike, but I was there because, with all the city of Chicago has to do — combat crime, filter water, wrangle statues and more — that it also teaches residents to ride bikes, for free, well, that seemed charming in a 1930s, WPA, summer camp kind of way.
     “Biking is good for our bodies and a cheap, fast way to get around,” said Emme Williams, one of five instructors at the class, known as SAFE (Streets Are For Everyone) ambassadors.
     A short section of West Fedinand Street in East Garfield Park was closed off with orange cones, and the pedals removed from three bikes so the beginners could practice scooting forward.

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Statue of limitations

     A reader wrote in Friday complaining that my column had offended him. Specifically, The Economist's Adam Roberts comparing segregation in Chicago to apartheid in South Africa had offended him. Apparently, it trivialized the latter.
     This is the classic passive-aggressive tango. By saying something or doing something, you somehow step on a toe of mine, and ouch, it hurts. It can be done with literally anything. Watering your flowers is a slap in the face of drought-stricken subsaharan Africa. Kissing your child in public is a mockery of parents whose children have died...
     Ignoring that the supposedly harmed party is actually slipping his toe under the descending foot.  Someone is shot somewhere and they clutch at their chest and fall down. 
     The thing to do would have been to shrug, thank him for writing, and move on. But I must have been feeling feisty, on a Friday afternoon, so I wrote back with my standard line when people are offended over something I've written—I tell them, it is you, not me, who are responsible for deciding to be offended about something. There's really not much I can do about it. And in this guy's case, I added words to the effect of, "Besides, Adam Roberts, the author of the piece, spent four and a half years in South Africa; how long were you there?"
      "Two weeks," he replied. There was more, and he might still be replying yet—I don't know, I dumped him behind the filter and moved on, my superpower, reminding myself: Never respond to people. Never never never. There's no upside. I have to remember that.
       People who are offended are like young children trying to buy a sports car with Monopoly money. They don't realize just how undervalued is the thing they're trying to spend.  I read a few of the cris du coeur—I guess that should be grida di cuore—from Italian American friends on Facebook and in the official correspondence of old line Italian American anti-defamation organizations about how Lori Lightfoot taking down two statues of Christopher Columbus is an icepick at their heart.
     There there. Change is hard. I would feel bad if Northbrook took down the water tower by my house—it's an original Horton Waterspheroid from 1955!—and my forebears were not gathering around it in 1924, garlanding it with flowers, and whatever.  And Southerners feel bad about Robert E. Lee going to the scrapyard.  We all feel bad, we're all complaining, in chorus, 24 hours a day on Twitter. 
    Not so bad that I would try to stop the water tower from coming down, mind you. It's their tower. A nuance lost on the statue complainers: the statues belong to the city. They can decide what stays, what goes. Not getting more cops hurt, letting overheated passions cool, both seem excellent reasons for tucking away a pair of bothersome edifices. 
    That flies by people who are hot to feel hurt. The taking down of Columbus statues is about a lot of things, but Italian Americans are not one of them. Hence the offense, slipping into a birthday party you weren't invited to and sticking your fingers in the cake. Me me me. Using their bodies as a shield, writing injured letters about "The Godfather" movies. You can do it. It's your right. But it is worse than a losing battle. It's fighting a battle you've already won. To put it in my own wheelhouse, it's like Jews who complained that the Penguin character in one of the Batman remakes is some deeply-veiled anti-Semitic trope. Really? That's what you've got? What, no picket line outside Marshall Field's State Street store this week, demanding the name be changed back from Macy's? I don't dictate what bothers people, but really, how can they not see that some gripes indict the complainer worse than the thing being griped about. The most embarrassing stereotype of an Italian-American I've ever seen heads up the FOP.
      Three thoughts...

Massacre Monument

      1) Do you realize how many statues in Chicago get moved, removed, relocated, put in storage? They dissolve in the harsh Chicago weather, or are stolen, or just plain lost?  Carl Rohl-Smith's "Massacre Monument" terrified generations of Chicago school children, first at Prairie and 18th, then at the Chicago Historical Society, then back on Prairie, and now is in some warehouse somewhere, assuming that isn't a euphemism for being melted down for scrap.  I can't pretend the city is the poorer.  All the weeping over the Columbus statues being removed from Grant and Arrigo parks, the mustachioed ancestored venerated, tend to overlook that the latter was moved there in 1966, its third location, at least. 
      2) Statues are not signs of social acceptance, or general reverence or really an indication of anything other than the ability of a certain group at a certain time to scrape together the money to put a statue up. I mean God bless Irv Kupcinet, I knew the man, respected and admired him. And at one point he certainly was the greased axle upon which Chicago span. But it's been a while, and I can't imagine his statue sends many visitors running to Amazon to order "Kup: A man. An era. A city." 
     Which is too bad; I've read it. A rollicking memoir. On page two, he is showing Veronica Lake and Gary Cooper around on a war bond drive in 1943 and the platinum blonde bombshell turns to Coop, looks him straight in the eye and says, "Do you want to fuck me?"
     On page two. If I had to pick one tribute to represent Kup through the ages, I'd choose that passage, hands down, over the statue. And I actually really like the statue that his friends and descendants commissioned, as a rendition of the human form: it has a comforting smoothness, as did Kup, at least until the last few years. 
     But does anybody think it needs to stay across the river from Trump Tower until the end of time? (Besides Jerry* and David Kupcinet and a few others I no doubt will hear from, though I'm hoping that, by putting this on my blog and not in the paper, I can avoid that). 
     If a mob decided to hurl the Jack Brickhouse statue into the river, as some kind of daft protest against how Cubs games were broadcast back in the day, I can't say I'd weep too much for the loss to the city's patrimony, and I had lunch with the man. (And I'm sorry Jerry, sorry Pat. I factored in the hurt I thought you were our pal emails. But Kup wouldn't care at all and Jack would just laugh. You know that. Besides, the Brickhouse statue is almost pharaonic in its wordiness, approaching Roland Burris tombstone level verbiage. I knew Jack, and like to think he'd be embarrassed at that).
     3) Immigrant groups of every stripe remember the wrongs done to them, and lovingly sort and categorize every hurt against them, every button of suffering, kept in a little box, without the thought ever crossing their minds that they are now in a better position on the slippery pole of society, and might, instead of fighting to the death every outmoded bit of sculpture, instead use their status to alleviate the very same suffering their grandfathers felt, now being inflicted upon new categories of people. 
     So they wave the bloody shirt of self-assigned wrongs, oblivious, claiming a hurt that most people just don't feel, completely ignorant that the fuss they're making about themselves engenders more ill-will than the supposed slight they're complaining about. It's the curse of expending all your emotional energy on your own precious self. History is supposed to enlarge you, not make you tinier. Yet too many from groups who have suffered, probably because they themselves are doing so well, turn around, sharpen that history into a pointed stick, and use it to become some of the most energetic, oblivious bigots I've ever encountered. This is true for every nationality, race and religion. It can't be said enough. Sympathizing with yourself is no accomplishment. It is common as dirt and means almost nothing. The Columbus struggle is lost, done, finito. He was the life ring that Italians, drowning in a toxic sea of nativist hate, grabbed at in the 1890s to float themselves toward respectability. It worked. But 130 years have passed—sorry to be the one to tell you. The Great Navigator turned into a stone now dragging them down. Those statues won't get put back because the social milieu that saw them put up is completely changed. I'd think that would be a good thing, but I guess it's not.

* Turns out that Jerry Kupcinet passed away last year. Condolences. And apparently David Kupcinet DOES read the blog, or did. His Facebook response deserves posting here: 

     I should point out that I've never met David Kupcinet, so my being an asshole to him is no doubt a creation of his mind, the lunge toward victimhood that so drives public conversation. Honestly, I'm in his debt. David Kupcinet unwittingly illustrates my point better than I do. Look at what I actually say in the post above that so sets him off: I like and respect Kup. I cite his book, which I've read. I like the statue. But point out that doesn't mean it has to be in that spot forever. And boom! David lets loose his bladder into this incontinent puddle of anger, spraying me with all he's got, never pausing for a second to imagine that just maybe the statue being OF HIS OWN GRANDFATHER might affect his judgment, or lack of which. He's the poster boy for all this statue idiocy we see. I should send him a cheesecake.     

Texas Notes: Shadow of death

     If you think this crisis is hard to endure, consider this: you could be in Texas, like our Austin Bureau Chief, Caren Jeskey. Her report:

     A lot has changed since Wednesday March 11. On that day we heard whispers about a strange and deadly virus that was rapidly spreading. I immediately canceled a bulk of my contract work that would have put others and myself at risk. My therapy clients at that time were all over 65 and/or medically fragile. I had been teaching classes at a destination spa. I became close to unemployed that week (save a few clients who were up for telehealth).
     Today Texas is positively rampant with COVID-19. This week we learned that 85 babies in Nueces County have tested positive since March— 60 of them in the month of July. Over 4,000 Texans have died.
     The first phase of virus life for me was to shelter in place, other than shopping for essentials and exercising outdoors. The streets and sidewalks were all but deserted. I forgot about the world and got lost in hours-long, rambling walkabouts. I automatically beelined away from the small number of folks who passed me by, unless they yielded first. It was easy. Then businesses started opening again, first to 25% capacity and then increasing to 50% or even more, which gave people a false sense of security. Restless, bored Texans decided they were done with the rules and started living as though the virus was over. Once calming and peaceful walks in the early virus ghost town days turned into minefields where it was impossible to get away from obstinate people who have vetoed the idea of playing it safe. 

     While I was on a walk earlier this week most neighbors in my eclectic, trendy, middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood were not masked or making any effort to distance. Within five minutes of leaving my house these pod people had descended into my safety zone. I peered at them from the top of my masked face and their bald faces stared back. I threw my arms in the air and called out to a neighbor I know “no one is distancing!” and then I heard myself growl. A young woman ran by, and I felt her breeze as she passed within a foot or two of me. I called out “can you please distance or at least wear a mask?” She flipped me the bird and yelled back “you were in my way.” We were on a pedestrian/bike path. My blood boiled and I also felt sad. I could feel tears well up as I processed this assault.
     I realized I had to get away and turned off the path onto a side street towards a sleepier neighborhood with huge houses and wide roads where I knew I’d be safer. On my way there an unmasked man rode up to me on his bicycle, sneezed in my face, and cackled. I held my phone up, pretending to film him (I was too shocked to think clearly enough to hit record) and he biked away, still laughing.
     On July 4th a group of people gathered at the State Capitol for what they christened a “Shed the Mask, Don the Flag” rally. Since all of this can wear a sane person down, I have officially decided to stop fighting and instead I will yield.     

     Along with the increasing challenges and frustrations of life with COVID, many things have changed for the better. I was allowed to spend time as the solo guest in the Elisabet Ney museum, which I discovered on an early walkabout and wrote about in an EGD post Badass Women. I shared the blog post with the docent there and as a result was invited in. Up until that day I’d only been able to see the faces of a striking stone woman (Lady MacBeth) and the chiseled profile of a bearded man (Prometheus) through a window. Once inside I silently walked up the narrow wooden staircase Elisabet had once walked. I felt her power. I visited with her immense stone and marble creations and basked in the presence of a woman who created magic during her life.
     I’ve worn holes into the soles of my Birkenstocks. The pounds are slipping away according to the scale I am no longer afraid to stand on each morning.
     As I write this I feel grateful. Even as the shadow of death is all around us, thus far I am safe. I am not a front line worker. I do not have to take buses to and from work. I do not have to stand at a counter and serve customers who refuse to wear masks. The fact that all of this might change in a blink of an eye, or in the spray of a sneeze is not lost on me.