COVID, five years on: memories of a strange and scary time

     When did COVID start for you? Personally, I trace the beginning to Feb. 13, 2020. My wife and I were waiting for a plane at O'Hare when a group of Japan Airlines flight attendants walked past, wearing those masks I'd read about. I snapped a photo and sent it into the city desk. Look: news.
     Emotionally, it really began in March. The stripped Target shelves. A few hours before Gov. JB Pritzker shut down the restaurants, I popped into Kamehachi for a last sushi fix and was surprised to find myself the lone diner at 12:30 p.m. Watching the chef prepare my order, thinking, with dread: "I'm killing myself for a negi hamachi roll."    

      Though if you are looking for the very beginning in the Chicago area, I suppose that should be Jan. 13, 2020 — five years ago Monday — when a suburban woman returned from Wuhan, China, where she had been caring for her elderly father, bringing with her the COVID virus. A few days later she felt ill and went to Ascension St. Alexius Medical Center in Hoffman Estates. making her the first person in Illinois, the second in the United States, diagnosed with a disease that, in the next half decade, would kill more than 1 million Americans and 20 million worldwide.
     Anniversaries are complicated. Five years is not that long, but already COVID has gone hazy. A lot of people seem to have forgotten it ever occurred. Or have taken away a deep antipathy toward both medicine and measures to prevent infection — vaccines are poison, masks an unacceptable intrusion upon their personal liberty. That seems far from what the actual lessons should be. Perhaps a reconsideration is in order.
     But it can be hard to form clear judgments, because COVID was immediately politicized — a plot of foreigners, a blue state concern. As if a virus cares who you voted for. As severely as COVID rocked society, it was also just one bad element of a very bad year. Within a 10-month span, the world was shut down by a deadly plague then, two months later, American cities were rocked by riots after the murder of George Floyd. Then in January, the Capitol was stormed by rioters. Not exactly memories that folks want to dwell on.
     The crisis shifted when the vaccine became available in early 2021. Some wouldn't stick out their arm to get it. Me, I drove down to Springfield, expecting a mob scene at the Walgreen's, like the ending of the movie "The Year of Living Dangerously," with crowds climbing over each other and mothers waving their babies at frenzied med techs. Instead, the store was empty and silent. There weren't even shoppers. It was strange and a little frightening.
     Maybe that's why people so readily forget COVID; it was so odd, so scary. Who can look back fondly at hoarding toilet paper? Though I do take pride in my response. I didn't want to sit out the plague sheltering in Northbrook, and tried to find a role I could play. I've written lots of medical stories — heart transplants, lung transplants, autopsies, you name it, so figured I should explore the medical response. Photographer Ashlee Rezin and I began with a three-part series, looking at the harried nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital, then moved on to Roseland.

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Flashback 1999: Devastation of home lights fire under couple

      So what happens once the fires are finally out? To the thousands and thousands of people whose homes were destroyed in the Los Angeles inferno, who now have to start their lives over? A task in many ways more daunting than fleeing the flames. To return and rebuild or, more likely, begin anew somewhere else.
     I was rooting around in what I've written about Los Angeles fires — this is the worst, but it's not the first. I found this from more than 25 years ago, looking at what one couple did after they were burned out of their home. Afterward, I'll give an update.

     What would you grab, rushing out of your house as it burned down?
     A classic dilemma that raises a tingle, rolling over in the mind. Imagine. You wake up, the place in flames, you can grab something. What is it?
     Myself, I settled that question years ago: pants.
     I decided this after covering a fire at the Drake Hotel.
     None of the guests was ever in danger — the fire was in an electrical vault under the sidewalk — but a few nevertheless decided to flee wearing their fluffy white Drake Hotel robes.      And nothing else.
     They were a sight, lounging in the small park north of the hotel, waiting to be allowed back in. After that I resolved that, unless I was myself aflame, I would take the five seconds to grab pants, which I keep conveniently crumpled on the floor, ready, in case of emergency. Pants; then kids; then wife; then, if time permits, cats, then out the door.
     A mild fright to think about. But Megan Edwards actually confronted the awful reality six years ago, when the Altadena fire storm burned 1,000 homes near Los Angeles, including hers.
     She had a few minutes to get out. She grabbed her red underwear and a keepsake Indian arrowhead. She didn't bother with anything else.
     That was odd enough. But then something really unusual happened. When she returned, with her husband Mark Sedenquist, to the charred rubble of their home (the only thing standing was a shower stall) she had a revelation. Amidst the ruins, Edwards decided: They wouldn't rebuild. They would buy a big motorhome and crisscross the country, which is what they have been doing for the last five years. She has written a book, "Roads from the Ashes," about the experience.
     Though Edwards is from the Chicago area — an Army brat, she was born in the hospital at Great Lakes Naval Base — she is obviously a Californian now. In her book, she is practically ecstatic as she sifts through the smoky remains of her home.
     "There's nothing here, nothing at all. We can do anything we want," she bubbles to her husband. "Anything. Do you know what that means? We can go anywhere, do anything, start over again. Whatever. I think we should think of this as an opportunity. I think it just could be the most amazing thing."
     "Shut up," her husband says — and I murmured a hearty "Amen."
     Still, I was interested in talking to her, to see if she could possibly have been that pleased about everything she owned going up in smoke.
     "I was in shock," she said, in the couple's motor home, parked in front of the Sun-Times. But not unhappy? What about family photos?
     "I'm not that big a photograph person," she said, displaying the impenetrability of the enlightened, a wall I was determined to breach.
     "What about your books?" I asked, surveying the spartan interior of the motor home. She is, after all, a writer. Here I came a little closer to cracking through her shell of chirpy California karma.
     "I do miss my books," she said, as if she meant it.
     Then there was the question of money. In the book, practical matters — which demand so much time and effort from us nonspiritual folk — have a way of ironing themselves out. Things just appear. For instance, after the fire, use of a guest house on a secluded estate in San Gabriel "materialized magically," and they lived there for five months. They have a slick Web site —www.roadtripamerica.com — but not one with advertisements. Who pays for everything?
     "We decided we would always do our own thing and the money would be there," said Edwards.
     "Most people have these fears; if you quit your job, what's the worst that can happen?" said her husband. "That can happen anyway. In half an hour, it can all disappear. It frees you up to be more risky."
     Very nice, but who's paying? The insurance company never settled on the house. They didn't have a big bankroll. Call it the practical Midwesterner in me, but I was curious. Edwards said they had investors.
     "What are they investing in?" I asked. "Where are their returns coming from?" She said they were investing in her writing, hoping to reap profits from some as-yet-uncertain enterprise down the road. A movie maybe.
     I eventually gave up. They don't miss their stuff, and the money comes from somewhere. I would have to take it on faith.
     Walking back to the material world, I glanced back at the mobile home.
     "What would YOU do if all your stuff went up in smoke?" is written on its side, in big letters. Despite its surface anti-materialism, there was something very late 1990s America going on here, the seizing of a moment of personal disaster and spooling it into a career, almost into a brand. The stuff might have burned up, but the moment was preserved forever in this bit of wandering performance art.
     It seemed a tough way to make a living: Sure, you see the nation. But I've never taken a vacation in my life where, two weeks into it, I wasn't itching to get home. "What would YOU do if all your stuff went up in smoke?" I'd cry like a baby.
       — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 29, 1999

Megan Edwards finally settled in Las Vegas, and has written four more books.

Fresh-squeezed orange juice

   

     Few sounds are as welcome as a juicer. That pulpy grinding noise, and liquid whir. I'm not awash in golden childhood memories, but one of them is lying in bed in the morning in the summertime  and hearing that sound wafting in from the kitchen and knowing my mother is making fresh-squeezed orange juice to go with breakfast.
     Fresh-squeezed is the only kind worth drinking. There was a cylinder of frozen concentrate, you'd plop into a pitcher and add water then mash it into a semblance of orange juice. But even as a child I could sense it was hardly worth drinking and, frankly, I haven't had it in so many years it came as a surprise to discover it's still sold in stores.

      And Tang, the powdered orange juice-like drink — also still sold, amazingly, though it seems mostly sold in foreign countries, where they don't know any better. The stuff was festooned with space age pretensions, fooling no one. I haven't drunk it in 50 years and still can't think of Tang without a visceral shiver. 

    The lure of freshly squeezed orange juice is what sends John McPhee on the journey that becomes his classic book of reportage, "Oranges." The book opens by commenting on the supposed rarity of the predilection: 

     "The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very widespread, taking the world as a whole, and is thought by many peoples to be a distinctly American habit."

    McPhee later contradicts that notion by pointing out that oranges show up four times in Shakespeare, and frank English diarist Samuel Pepys had his first glass on March 9, 1669, noting, "I drank a glass, of a pint, I believe, of the juice of oranges, of whose peel they make confits, and here they drink the juice as wine, with sugar, and it is a very fine drink; but, it being new, I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt." (You might remember Pepys from the relapse chapter of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," where he too often had no such reluctance in quaffing far more than a glass of wine, though it was definitely doing him hurt). 

    In the book, McPhee heads to Florida. He assumes, once he gets there, that the sun-washed Floridians will be partaking in the orange abundance all around them. They don't. As soon as he checks into his Winter Haven motel, he goes in search of fresh orange juice: 

     "Next door was a restaurant, with orange trees, full of fruit, spreading over its parking lot. I went in for dinner, and, since I would be staying for some time and this was the only restaurant in the neighborhood, I checked on the possibility of fresh juice for breakfast. There were never any requests for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. 'Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something,' she said. 'Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting.' She seemed to know her business, and I began to sense what turned out to be the truth — that I might as well stop asking for fresh orange juice, because few restaurants in Florida serve it."   

     Fresh juice is dismissed because it is "less consistent" (as is wine, McPhee observes). McPhee doesn't have to bother laying out how ashamed he is of his fellow Americans; instead he hurries to a hardware store, buys a hand reamer and a knife, and sets to making orange juice himself out of the fruit plucked from trees.
     The path of the purist is never easy.
     As much as I love fresh-squeezed orange juice, I stopped making it, for years. Fell out of the habit, mainly because grocery stores didn't generally sell juice oranges. I guess it takes too long, and the bottled varieties are good enough. Plus my wife doesn't particularly like it.

     But we started patronizing the Russian grocery, Fresh Farms Market on Milwaukee, and they sell Valencia oranges, and I began to buy a dozen, and occasionally take a break from my standard grapefruit to go with a glass of OJ. Heaven.

     Then diabetes hit — over three months ago — and fruit juice was forbidden as an unacceptable jolt of sugar. But as time went by, and I figured out how to adjust my diet and regulate my blood sugar using insulin, I realized that fresh squeezed orange juice had returned to the realm of the possible.

     I waited until the perfect moment — one day last week I was coming back from walking Kitty just as my blood glucose was beginning to tank into unacceptable levels. I set her up with her breakfast, then popped into the basement to retrieve three likely sacrificial oranges — you can tell by holding them in the flat of your palm, which ones are fat with juice.

     I'm not good enough a writer to describe just how excellent that glass of orange juice tasted after a three month hiatus. I won't say that contracting diabetes was worth it for that one glass of juice. But absence makes the heart grow fonder. And that glass did remind me that it is a joyful, juicy world, no matter who is going to be inaugurated a week from Monday. We mustn't lose sight of that. Being miserable won't shorten his administration by an hour. Enjoy your fresh-squeezed orange juice, if you can. It's worth the effort.

It looks huge in the photo, but it's an eight ounce glass.

Los Angeles is burning — or is it?

"Oranges on Fire," by Larry Sultan (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

     "What is truth?" Pontius Pilate asks the crowd, after Jesus tells him that he is not a king, but a man whose task is to bear witness to the truth.

     In the "Jesus Christ Superstar" version of the above, the governor of Judea continues, "Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?"
     Certainly not. Not for the two millennia since — actually, longer. Plato, four centuries before the Crucifixion, spent much time arguing what we know and how we know it.
     So as the United States of America prepares to inaugurate, once again, a man with a proven proclivity for telling lies — easily, continually, and without consequence — we can take a bit of cold comfort that at least we didn't invent this conversation.
     Mark Zuckerberg just gave up Tuesday and announced that Facebook will cease third-party fact-checking, and instead count on community notes after posts.
     How will that work?
     Take an indisputable fact: Los Angeles is on fire. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: Why is Los Angeles on fire? I would point to the 99 mile-an-hour winds and tinder-dry landscape. Prodded to dig deeper, I might remind readers how climate change is making ecological disasters more severe and more frequent.

     But a member of the community could attach a note saying: no, Elon Musk claims on his private megaphone, X, that the fires were fanned by racial inclusivity.
     "They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes," Musk wrote, retweeting a notorious troll's assessment about the L.A. Fire Department's "racial equality plan."
     In the past, Facebook might remove that odious piece of racism. Now it won't, but is counting on community members to, perhaps, point out that it is a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy to suggest that because the disastrous fire followed efforts to combat racism, it was therefore caused by them. You could just as easily, and just as inaccurately, argue that the department's Taco Tuesday caused the escalation of the fires Wednesday, since it happened first.
     Plato — spoiler alert — concluded that the truth is whatever he can convince others is true, though that could take some doing, even then, long before the advent of social media.
     "Could you persuade men who do not listen?" one of his associates asks, in the beginning of "The Republic," sounding a central question of our time.

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We're lucky he doesn't want to name it the "Gulf of Trump"

Loteria cards (National Museum of Mexican Art)

     Was I wrong to feel a flash of optimism upon hearing Trump announce he wants to change the name of the "Gulf of Mexico" to the "Gulf of America"?
     Not a spot on your National Calamity Bingo Card, right? Less than two weeks before the inauguration, Trump rears out of the shadows for a press conference, and that is what he comes up with? Well, plus seizing Greenland by force. And the Panama Canal.
     Those who still believe that the once and future president is some genius playing 3-dimensional chess might claim that these batshit notions are intentional, served up for distraction, the master magician directing your attention to the green felt table while he palms the crucial card. The detention camps are being readied while the public gabbles about changing names on maps.
      And maybe it is optimistic of me, to see floating the name change as the typical presidential dithering, another pipe dream that comes to nothing from the jabbering dupe who floated the idea of closing all the mosques in the country and killing the families of terrorists. We've had four years of those already; four more years on deck! Clap on those noise-cancelling headphones because it's going to get ugly!
     I mean, we get it. The man is broken, an enormous sucking black hole of ego, a void of such intensity that he will attempt to rename random geographical locations to better reflect our unquestioned national glory (although, now that I think of it, I'm a little surprised he didn't cut to the chase and call it the Gulf of Trump. Maybe that's coming).
     Plus Trump really, really hates Mexico. Or — to return to the chessmaster metaphor — knows that his base really, really hates Mexico. Though of course both can be true, as the his followers adopt his positions. It is the horse he rode in on, and he's spreading it for nearly a decade like a drunken sailor spreading gonorrhea. So seizing the gulf from the insult of Mexican nomenclature is just the latest thumb in the eye of our neighbors south of the border. He'll force Frito Lay to bring back the Frito Bandito next. 
    Given that, it's a shame one of his advisers didn't suggest they just rename Greenland, "Trumpland," or some such thing. Seize it without firing a shot. That's the easy path, and easy victories are what this is all about, as actual accomplishments in the living world are, you know, harder to do than just saying stuff.

Inauguration Day is coming and I haven't a thing to wear

 

     A colleague once found himself committed to the locked alcoholism ward at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Though we were not friends, I decided, being a sort of self-designated official greeter for recovery, it might be a fine thing were I to visit him there.
     Lutheran General is where Elton John got sober. If you ever saw "Rocketman," it's amusing to contrast the place as it appears in the film — arched hallways, Roman columns, brass sconces — to the dated, sprawling facility on Dempster. No self-playing grand piano noodling in the lobby, no life-size fiberglass whale hanging from the ceiling, none of the other fripperies found in the finer downtown or North Shore medical establishments.
     Arriving, I got the sense there wasn't a conga line of visitors. Finally I found someone to let me in, show me a locker to stash my possessions — a strategy to cut down on visitors passing booze to residents — and eventually was ushered into my co-worker's room.
     He wasn't in shape to receive company — restrained, with wide leather cuffs strapped to his wrists and ankles. I settled myself into a chair, radiating what I hoped was cheerful solicitude. He looked at me and started talking incoherently, a babble of nonsense syllables. I nodded, eyes wide, for 10 minutes or so before I decided I'd done my duty and fled.
     This episode came to mind when I asked my wife if she intends to watch the presidential inauguration, and she said she probably couldn't bear it. I said that I feel obligated to. Duty-bound.
     There is a value in showing up, bearing witness, being there, if not to the person being visited, then to the person doing the visiting. I doubt very much my few minutes in Park Ridge registered on the booze-shattered psyche of my former colleague. But it certainly stuck with me, one of those little helpful reminders that as refreshing as a big glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks might seem at any given moment, best to stay on the path instead. Avoid the ditch.
     That's why, even though everything I've written over the last decade, taken together, has not diverted the country from its running plunge into the abyss, I still feel the need to pay attention, through latticed fingers, and offer occasional commentary — not for the nation's benefit, but mine. And maybe yours too.
     Actually, a program I'm familiar with offers a variety of tips that might prove helpful to us in enduring what is to come. Over my desk is a plaque that reads, "One Day at a Time," and that is helpful, today being all we have.
     Then there is the escape of rote activities. When I went into rehab — 20 years ago this fall, my the time does fly — I think I spent five days cleaning the basement. I remember sweeping a line of fine gray dust across the concrete floor and thinking: This is very zen. Like being in a monastery. I easily have four years' worth of deferred household chores, if not 40. Now is the perfect opportunity.

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"A sense of closeness and carefree happiness"

     Monday's column on media maven Robert Feder — the man who urged me to join Twitter a decade and a half ago — getting tossed off Facebook drew a lot of response. One anonymous comment stood out:

     "Having noticed Facebook's sharp decline over the last few years, I think they're just making sure actual human-created content doesn't get in the way of the AI-generated pink slime that clutters the platform now."

      I've noticed that myself. We are always being told how AI is getting better and better. But most of what I read from it is near gibberish, like the above, recently plucked off Facebook. 

     I can't be sure it was produced by AI — it could, I suppose, been written by someone in some unimaginable basement boiler room in Mumbai, grabbing historical photos and slapping blocks of words under them.

     But it has the wordy obliviousness of AI. The suggestion that the photo "exudes a nostalgic allure" not only uses four words where one would do ("nostalgic") but it almost entirely wrong. That description might make sense to a machine or harried sweatshop habitue. But the photo is obviously a piece of 1920s cheesecake. Which becomes clear, if it isn't already, when you consider the woman's bare arms, stockinged leg and — most significantly — the man's right hand planted on her ass.
      Yes, I realize that pooh-poohing AI has become the go-to move for me, and I imagine I'll be doing it until the day the Sun-Times quietly lets me go and substitutes an AI-generated version of my column, dubbed "Ne*l Ste*nberg" or some other barely legal expropriation.
     Kidding. They'd never go to the effort. When I'm gone, the newshole will just close around me, like the surface of a pond after a stone has been thrown in, as if I were never there.