New oaks

    “Life," Mary Shelley writes in Frankenstein, "although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

     That elegant phrase the 21-year-old author puts in the mouth of her monster, who tends to speak in "thees" and "thous" and praises life while explaining that only his miserable treatment has prodded him to violence. "Misery made me a fiend," he says. "Make me happy, and I will again be virtuous."
    He's onto something, though I'd suggest it's the other way around—be virtuous and it'll tend to make you happy.
    Either way, human life does sometimes require vigorous defending. Though any gardener knows that botanic life, while perhaps low on the anguish scale—it's not like we can ask plants—can benefit from a helping hand as well.

     Every autumn though this year is an open question, I join my buddies and head to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to cook thick steaks, drink cold beverages, take long saunas, and jump in the frigid lake. No question that our lives are defended in the process.

     Returning, I bring back memories, sometimes Held's deer jerky, though people complain ("It smells like a burned down house," Ross once said, which makes me a little sorry he's becoming a lawyer and not a writer, because that's a perfect description).

    And saplings. A good half dozen. Pines, firs, and, if I'm feeling ambitious, oaks. The first year, I planted them in the fall and they just vanished. The snows came and I never saw them again. The second, I put them in pots and set the pots on the back deck. I wanted to observe what was happening. What was happening, I decided, was bunnies. Because they were fine up to one point in winter. And then they vanished. So we do not know if plants feel anguish, we do know that bunnies find oaks delicious. Or maybe they were just really hungry.

     This year I took extra precautions, securing a roll of chicken wire and constructing little cages around my saplings.

     For a month I gazed hard at those little bare sticks, six inches tall. Scrutinizing their ends—as if we weren't all scrutinizing our own ends enough during this crisis. A bud? No. Maybe? No. How about today? No.

    Then one day, something. I clomped closer, leaned forward, looked close and hard. A very small but unmistakable sprouting.

     "LIFE!!!!" I cried, in a very Dr. Frankenstein-like fashion, arching back and fluttering my hands to heaven. "It's alive!!!"

     Now all I have to do is wait a few decades, and I'll really have something. But I am nothing if not patient; being a writer, you sorta have to be. 
     Until then, only one question came to mind. How do oaks figure into "Frankenstein"? Easy enough to find out.

    One sentence, early in the book: during a thunderstorm storm that our budding teenage doctor watches  boiling out from the Jura mountains. 

     "As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump."

     If you've paused at the have the lightning "issue from" the oak, remember that lightning comes from the ground up as well as from the sky down. 

     And a good place to end, being reminded that, as T.S. Eliot writes, "In my beginning is my end." Even the grandest trees die, and my happiness at my pair of saplings surviving their first winter might be echoed by some future owner mourning their passing. If there is a future, and if we care about life in it, which right now is an all too open question.

Immigrants with COVID-19 may hesitate to go to hospitals

Francisca Garcia

      What’s worse than fighting for your life against COVID-19 in a hospital?
     Fighting that battle at home.
     With the infection curve finally flattening, for now, and what attention is being paid to the sick concentrated on those in hospitals, it’s easy to forget: people with no insurance, or who are undocumented and fear entering the system, or just don’t know to seek care, are sick at home.
     Not many, relatively. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, only 4 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the state occur in private homes. Still, that’s some 200 deaths since February. Thousands more are being cared for, not by trained professionals, but family members.
     They can’t be counted, but they can be helped.
     For them, Francisca Garcia, a critical care nurse who heads the COVID unit at Holy Cross Hospital, has an important piece of advice: lay on your stomach.
     “For the patients who are awake and alert and able to follow directions, we ask them to lay on their stomach,” she said. “Laying on their stomach helps with lung capacity, increases oxygenation. It’s almost a little mini-miracle when we have patients prone.”
     She said this has become widespread practice.
     “Different countries and different hospitals are starting to do this,” she said. “In the ICU, we’ve been doing this for many, many years. Patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome, an acute phase patients’ lungs go into when they’re very sick. We’ve been doing this for 25 years. With COVID, nurses and doctors and hospitals all over have started trying it.”

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Flashback 2007: Suburban swine

     A stack of photographs tumbled out from a drawer. Pigs in a garden. Hadn't seen them in years, but I instantly thought of this column. The wonder is I haven't reprinted it long ago. The first item is oddly topical, with the internet allowing us to complain about everything all the time. This ran was back when my column filled a page and had a joke at the end, and I have kept the original subheads and the parting stab at humor.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     My wife and I honeymooned at a lovely spot—the Keeper's House, on Isle au Haut, in Maine's Acadia National Park. I still remember making the reservation, almost 20 years ago. The woman said that they had just one room available, but cautioned me that the room looked out over a dock, and at the end of the dock was a blue light, and the blue light sometimes bothered guests in that room, who complained that the light shone into their window, causing them dismay.
    I said OK, we'd just have to cope with the blue light, as the room was the last available, and we really wanted to stay at the place, a rustic inn made from an old lighthouse keeper's house, with no phone and no electricity, accessed only by the daily mail boat.
     So now we're stowing our luggage in the quaint room, with its mantle and candles and thick down comforter. Evening falls, and we look out the window, and begin to laugh, because the light is this little tiny cobalt blue light, way at the end of a dock, the size of a blue marble at this distance. The thought of someone being bothered by it, never mind complaining, was ludicrous.

     Though people do complain. They get bothered, and struggle like wolverines to make it right, forgetting that, more often than not, they'd be a lot better off if they took a breath and rather than try to sand off the rough edges of the world, instead adjusted their high expectations and repaired their lofty estimation of themselves and the perfection they consider their birthright.
     It was a dim blue light far away at the end of a dock, lovely in its own way.

SUBURBAN SWINE
     
     And now the story can be told. I've been champing at the bit to tell it, for well over a month now. But my next-door neighbors had not yet moved away—they left last week. And I didn't want to get them into trouble with the pig police.
     Which is an alien attitude, nowadays, in some parts of the Chicago area. Up in Lake Forest, for instance, where Robert and Kathleen Murphy sued their neighbor, Estelle Gonzales Walgreen, because she kept three pigs on her 2.3-acre property.
     The Murphys said the pigs were loud, dirty and threatened their safety.
     Which struck me as a joke. Because, as fate would have it, my next-door neighbor also had a couple of pigs—or so I was told, since I had never actually seen them myself. Never heard them. And never smelled them. Not once.
     And I tried, craning my neck over the nice cedar fence my neighbor built to contain them. I considered asking, "Show me your pigs." But that seemed nosy.
     Then one day last spring, around breakfast time, I blundered out the back door and, gasping, stopped dead in my tracks—there, in my neighbor's garden, which runs along the side of his house alongside my driveway, were pigs. Two big pigs, one pink, one black, nuzzling the greenery. I don't gasp often, but I gasped then because, really, one doesn't expect swine in the suburbs—well, not that kind of swine anyway.
     The first thing I did, of course, was call the boys, who hadn't seen the pigs either. Then I grabbed a camera. Then I knocked on the neighbor's door, but nobody was home. The garage door was ajar, however, and my first concern was that somebody had broken into the garage, releasing the pigs.
     I suppose I should have been thinking about filing my lawsuit ("discovery of said livestock caused an elevated heart rate and other as-yet-to-be-determined physiological conditions...") But really, my central concern was to get the pigs back into the garage before one of the 15 police cars that constantly patrol the streets of Northbrook slid by and my neighbor's pigs got busted.
     Having never shepherded pigs, I assumed it would be a simple matter of tapping them on the butt—with a stick perhaps—and they would trot in the intended direction. Wrong. It was like trying to herd a pair of fire hydrants. The pigs were happy where they were.
     By now, other neighbors were wandering over. One reached the wife on her cell phone, and she instructed us to dig into a tub of popcorn in the garage and use it to tempt the swine back into the garage. We did so, dropping a kernel a few inches in front of each pig. It would notice the kernel, eventually, lumber forward, snuffle up the morsel, and the process would repeat itself.
     It took about 20 minutes—one of the pigs balked—but eventually we got the beasts back inside the garage. It was about the most excitement the street had seen in a long time, probably since a few of us men removed an enormous wasp nest the summer before.
     The Murphys lost their case in Lake County court, and—all together now—are appealing the case to the Illinois Appellate Court.
     "No one wants to live next door to pigs," Robert Murphy told the Tribune. But that is not true—I wanted the pigs to live next door, had no complaint about them except for their reclusiveness, and am willing to testify in a court of law that I was glad that they were there, am glad I met them in their thrilling bid for freedom, and will miss them, and their owners, now that they are gone.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     I looked in vain for a pig joke that could be printed in a family newspaper.
     Failing at that, I noticed this coyote joke by Billy Crystal, which, given the packs roaming the city, is also apt:
     In L.A. we got coyotes in our garbage cans. Coyotes are just like my relatives -- they go out in pairs, they whine at night, and they go anywhere there's food.
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 29, 2007

Honor U.S. dead by not making more of them

Pete Stockslager, former Commander of American Legion Post 791, participates in a Memorial Day ceremony. A Vietnam War vet, Stockslager was an Air Force pilot stationed in Da Nang. He served two tours, flew 336 missions, and left the Air Force after six years with the rank of captain and 80 percent hearing loss from the roar of the jet engines.

     Monday is Memorial Day, and I know what you're thinking: boo hoo, no Memorial Day sales, no picnics, no parades...
     Well, dry your eyes. That isn't quite true. Some stores are open—my wife and I bought a washer at Abt a few weeks ago. Yes, the shopping experience is not the unbridled joy it once was. The employees are wearing masks now, more or less. As are we. No jars of Hershey's miniatures to fuel the deliberative process. We ran in, tapped an Electrolux, paid and ran out.    

     And picnics...of course you can still go outside. Outside is right there, where it's always been. True, you can't go to the lakefront. That's rough. And you can't gather your family or friends in groups, at least you're not supposed to. When I think of barbecues at Memorial Day, I think of that joyous moment when the charred hot dogs and Polish sausage are heaped on the big oval platter, the poppyseed buns stacked high in their big circular basket, the superfluous burgers glistening, just in case someone wants a burger, the pickles slivered, the potato salad mounded, the relish, mustards and —judge me harshly if you like but really, give it up because it's tiresome—ketchup set out and ready. People crowd around the kitchen island, elbow to elbow, nose to nape, grins big and goofy, hands shooting out in all direction—plates! forks!—spearing franks, splitting buns, scooping big dense spoonfuls of potato salad and chattering away how delicious everything looks. There's always enough.
     Not this year. Parades are out too. I suppose some could try a social distancing parade, but the just Northbrook Junior High Marching Band, spread out, would cover a mile and take 20 minutes to pass by, "The Stars and Stripes Forever" a thin, disjointed ditty wafting along the scattered spectators, as the horns at Cedar Street try to follow the drums three blocks back at Western.
     So sales ... barbecues ... parades —we've dispatched Memorial Day, have we not? Having covered the holiday's various elements, and can now look forward to 4th of July without fireworks. That will be. ..
     Oh wait. I've forgotten something, haven't I? Memorializing fallen soldiers...

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The Cave Dwellers

Joseph Mitchell

     Greatness guides.  Or can, if we let it.
     Several times in my career when, facing a dilemma, I pondered what my idols would do in a similar situation. When writing my first book, about college pranks, I wondered whether I could get away with writing the chapter on Caltech's Ditch Day by consulting the many articles already written about the annual event. Or did I really need to try to pry the secret date out of class officials, then spend a chunk of my advance buying airplane tickets to Pasadena and back, plus booking a hotel room, then actually fly to California and attend the event itself?
     I solved this dilemma by asking, "What would John McPhee do?" The great New Yorker writer was always there, up that tree with that logger, or in the canoe cutting through some stream "as cold as a wine bucket" in Alaska. That gave me my answer, John McPhee wasn't phoning it in. He'd go.  So I went to California, and the chapter is far, far better for those select few who have ever read it.
     Or on a more regular basis, if I find myself contemplating revealing something awkward or uncomfortable that I had rather not write about, I remind myself: "If Dan Savage can write candidly  about being fucked up the ass, I can write about ... whatever. Owning eight Big Toe Uglydolls." (Savage is known for being a sex columnist, but he writes wonderful memoirs—"The Commitment," about getting married, "The Kid," about adopting a son. They're honest, funny, and delightful to read). People who win admiration are bold. Be bold. The enemy isn't embarrassment, but indifference.
     Greatness also comforts. I never attempt anything so ambitious that I can actually be guided by the example set by the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Gene Weingarten. That's would be like modeling your paper airplane after the B1 bomber. But we are both still in the same profession, or what's left of it, and that has to count for something. It's like admiring the stars at night: I didn't make 'em and I'll never get there. But I can look at them.
     So naturally Friday, right after dinner, I stepped out onto our front porch with Joseph Mitchell's "McSorely's Wonderful Saloon," a collection of New Yorker stories, and soothed myself. It worked like a charm.
     Mitchell was so famous for the unproductive last decades of his life, where he would go to his office at the New Yorker and, well, nobody knew what he did, that's it's possible to overlook just how good he was. He was excellent.
     I knew the story I was looking for, though I hadn't read it in many years: "The Cave Dwellers," a reminiscence about when he was a reporter for a New York tabloid in the early 1930s.
     "The winter of 1933 was a painful one," the tale begins, with Mitchell's trademark simplicity. Friday was certainly painful to me, and I'm not even sure why. At every step, I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Yet by day's end I was feeling so ... crappy. Maybe I was just tired.
     A couple had lived at O'Hare airport for nearly a month. The tip had come in from the wife of the couple, in an email Wednesday morning. My editor passed it on to me because, well, I'm kind of the Keeper of Lost Toys. I phoned the woman, like I was supposed to. She made sense. I drove to O'Hare to talk with her and her husband. They seemed what they said they were. We spent, oh, 90 minutes chatting. I had no question in my mind that everything she told me was true. She knew the streets of the old Taylor Street area where she said she grew up intimately. She knew who Oscar D'Angelo was. Nothing was suspect. She didn't seem to be trying to scam me or deceive me. She wasn't looking for anything.
     I wrote the piece Thursday morning, as expected. The part I was most proud of was the end, a sentence pointing out that those getting antsy being at home should be happy they have homes to be at.
    Friday morning the story was played across the entire front page. Credit Ashlee Rezin Garcia's moving photographs for that. The treatment wasn't expected, but appreciated. Every day on the front page is a good day.
    Except this one.
    Then emails started in. Lots and lots and lots. I'm used to emails. But this was ridiculous.
    In "The Cave Dwellers," Mitchell is covering the "human suffering" beat. Murders and Salvation Army bell ringers, breadlines and relief bureaus and evictions.
    "The attitude of the people I talked with was disheartening," he wrote. "They were without indignation. They were utterly spiritless."
     Maybe there was some of that. You don't become homeless because you're so dynamic. That echoed a phrase I wrote several times Friday, trying to explain the couple's situation: "learned helplessness." Some readers wanted to know why these people were homeless. I didn't know what to tell them. Others—most—wanted to help. But how? Where should their money go?
     I suppose I could have just ignored them, just skipped over their emails. Sorry, not my table. I just report the fires, I don't put them out.
    That didn't feel right. That would make me the faulty transmission, the void between the roaring engine of Chicago generosity and the mired wheel of this homeless couple. I didn't want to be that. My first thought was to set up a bank account for them. But I just work at the paper. I don't run it. We have policies. I consulted with my bosses, who reminded me: we don't do that sort of thing, I was told. And that makes sense. Because if we did, we'd slide into becoming social service, all our time would be taken up helping homeless individuals, and no stories would get written. I agreed, and was off the hook.
     And yet....
    "I began to feel I was preying on the unfortunate," Mitchell wrote.
    I was relieved when somebody set up a GoFundMe page. Problem solved. I began referring people to the page. For less than an hour. With each email referred, however, it dawned on me, clearer and clearer—I didn't know who this guy was. It could be a scam. Worse. A scam I was endorsing, just by making the referral. Thousands of dollars had already been pledged. I phoned up the person who organized the page. Our conversation did not settle my concerns. It was almost normal. But something was ... off. He was not a legit person, in my estimation, but someone acting like a legit person. A fine but important distinction. The emails kept pouring in. Maybe he was honest. Maybe he wasn't. I couldn't be sure. I got permission from the homeless woman to give out her email to those who wanted to help, so people could contact her directly. We stopped recommending the GoFundMe page. The couple moved from Terminal One of O'Hare to a Quality Inn, courtesy of a benefactor. The ace investigators at the paper looked into the GoFundMe page. There were worrisome questions, reservations. I won't go into details. We made sure not to recommend or link to the page. I ended up wordlessly forwarding the letters offering support to the wife's email, and to write the readers back, thanking them for their generous inclinations. It took the whole day. Nothing else got done.
     The cave dwellers of the story's title are a couple who lived in a cave in Central Park for a year but are living in an apartment by the time Mitchell meets them, down to their last seven cents, apparently. This is at the height of the Great Depression, another crisis moment in American history. The story Mitchell writes about the pair also goes on the front page. He also is overwhelmed by the reaction. "My box was stuffed with letters and telegrams from people who had read the story about Mr. and Mrs. Holliman, and attached to many of the letters were bills or checks to be turned over to them," Mitchell writes.
     At least I didn't have to deal with that.
     He revisits the couple, trying to give them the donations the readers had sent. The couple is in mid-spree, with liquor bottles scattered about, cigars, gift baskets wrapped in cellophane. I'm not suggesting that my O'Hare couple would respond to support in the same way. Rather, it is the sense of let-down I related to. No kindness goes unpunished. The couple is indignant over a slight error. The husband starts in.

    "You said in that writeup we only had seven cents left, you liar."
    "Well, that's what your wife told me."
    "I did not," said Mrs. Holliman, indignantly. She got up and waver her tumbler, spilling gin and ginger ale all over the bed. "I told you we had seventy cents left." 

     They refuse the money Mitchell has collected, chase him out of the room, throwing a gin bottle at his head as he flees down the stairs. Back at his office, he has to send each donations back to each individual reader. The couple are swept up by a millionaire in a limousine who. takes them to live with him at his farm in New Jersey. But when Mitchell checks on them a few months later, they are gone.
    "I think they left me because they just got tired of living in a house," the millionaire tells Mitchell.
     Life is too complicated to whittle down into a news story, yet we try anyway. Most people are good, most people want to help. I certainly consider myself to be a good person who wants to help. But helping can be difficult and fraught with complications. You can do everything right and at the end of the day it still feels wrong, and you aren't even sure why.




   

Texas Notes: Badass Women

     The latest report from EGD's Austin bureau chief, Caren Jeskey.

     We all know Jane Addams (1860-1935), a progressive social reformer and the mother of social work who said “old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.”       You’ve probably heard of Emma Goldman (1869-1940) who was an anarchist social justice advocate who said “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.” 

      You may even know Sissy Farenthold (born 1926, 93 years old today), a human rights activist who was nominated to be Vice President of the United States in 1972 and finished second at the Democratic Convention that year. She said “I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns and women join the unqualified men in running our government.” 

     But I betcha don’t know Elisabet Ney. Grab your pipe and a cup of tea, have a seat in your cozy overstuffed armchair and let’s fix that right now.

     Elisabet Ney was a stone sculptor from Prussia who moved to the US and built a modest castle for herself in 1892 in Austin where she could sculpt and showcase her art. It also became a salon where progressive folks sat to share ideas and debate the state of the world. Elisabet shocked her 19th century community by daring to wear bloomers. That’s right. A woman in pants, scandalous! Though kind of makes sense for person who rides horses, don’t you think? Anyway. She also used her — can I even say it? — maiden name. That’s right. The maiden had an opinion and deemed herself worthy enough to express it, including living her life on her own terms. As shocking as it is, there are some brilliant and talented women in the world who have their very own ideas and make their own choices about how they will live their lives. Some even become bad ass sculptors or — if you want to be dramatic — sculptresses, while they are at it.
     Elisabet named her castle Formosa from the Latin formosus meaning beautifully formed. Formosa is now a museum closed due to COVID-19 that can at least be visited on a YouTube channel today. When I first saw this stone castle in the middle of the city during a COVID walkabout I thought “oh, Austin, there you go again.” This is a city of hidden gems. I returned to this magical place in the city time and time again before I realized how much meaning I’d find behind the walls, which I still have not had the delight of entering. On my first visit I ogled the structure with its grand balconies where I could picture Elisabet sitting and watching the sunset after a day of strenuous building. I stood in front of the columns and exquisitely detailed stonework and felt this woman’s power. I sat on the front stoop and enjoyed the view of the carefully tended gardens.
     On my next visit I gravitated along the gravel path weaving through what reminds me of a prairie restoration project one would see along the lakefront at Montrose Beach or around the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum in Chicago, but with Texas live oaks boldly claiming their space in the landscape. I weaved around to the back of the castle and noticed modern sculptures in the backyard, including bright blue felted birds’ nests appearing real on the limbs of a tree. The windows in the back of the castle were too high for me to see into, but I was entranced to find just the head of a larger than life graceful stone woman looking longingly into the distance in one of the rooms, and in the room next to her a solitary man doing the same. I wanted to climb the wall and go into those rooms, but I am sure there were cameras and a good security system so resisted this strong urge.
     On one of my visits two police officers — and I thanked them for their service — approached me and asked me if I worked there, since they were responding to the alarm going off. I said no and we chatted until the true proprietors arrived. The irony of the fact that one of these officers mansplained incorrect information about Elisabet Ney to me was not lost on me. “Her husband never lived here in Texas with her. She sculpted the Goddess of Liberty on the top of the Capitol building.” Wrong, and wrong. I tried to tell him, but he was sure he was right so I let it go. After all, he was the one with the gun, the badge, and let’s face it, the anatomical right to silence me. I’m used to it.
     The plaque in front of the museum mentions that Elisabet had strong opinions, thus was considered eccentric. I guffawed. A woman with opinions? In the South! Well, she must be eccentric. That odd bird. When I read more about her online after this visit I fell even more deeply in love. She viewed the institution of marriage as a state of bondage for women — not to say I think it always is — and is quoted to have said “women are fools to be bothered with housework. Look at me; I sleep in a hammock which requires no making up. I break an egg and sip it raw. I make lemonade in a glass, and then rinse it, and my housework is done for the day.” She went on a hunger strike for weeks when her parents opposed her being a sculptor and not only did she get her way and followed her dreams, but her works are showcased in the Texas State Capitol building today (no not the one on the top, Officer).
     She was an early leader of the Texas Women’s Movement and a civil rights, education and arts advocate. I noticed that diminutively she’s described as “one of a kind” somewhere online. Oh that funny, odd, pants-wearing chick! Haha! She may have studied with the top sculptors of her time, excelled in her art, moved thousands of miles to a new land, learned a new language, built an impressive home for herself and her creations, and her work stands next to the more highly lauded male sculptors of her time, yet she’s called odd and eccentric and it almost seems as though folks found her cute. She’s not cute.  She’s a force of nature.
     I wonder how many men would feel comfortable changing their last names to theirs wives names, wearing skirts even when pants made more sense, being forced to study things that they were not interested in to conform to societal norms, and to be condescendingly called “one of a kind” for expressing their true selves? There are hundreds, thousands, probably millions of us who would walk in Elisabet Ney’s footsteps if we could, and we try. We will continue to try. Maybe one day this world will be equally led by women of strong heart and mind, unafraid to forge unique and powerful paths and will not be considered unusual.

Stuck at home? Try living at O’Hare — since April

Manuel and Linda Benavides at O'Hare airport (Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia)

     Linda Benavides and her husband, Manuel, slept at O’Hare International Airport Wednesday night. In Terminal 1, near baggage claim. At least they tried to sleep, until 2:30 a.m., when the police kicked them out, again. They went to sleep on the Blue Line.
     Or tried to.
     “There was a party on the train,” she said. “The Blue Line is bad. Drug addicts.”
     Most likely they will be back at O’Hare tonight, sleeping there again, or trying to, leaning against each other, using their jackets as blankets. 

     They’ve slept at O’Hare most nights for the past month. A good place to sleep, Linda said, because the bathrooms are right there. But not exactly pleasant.
     “It’s hard,” said Linda, 65. She said it several times. ”It’s hard.”   
     Why is it hard? Well, the lights are always on, for starters. And the constant looped announcements. “Cover coughs and sneezes and clean and disinfect hard surfaces...”
     Plus it’s cold. 
     “Like a refrigerator,” she said.
     The couple is used to the warmth of Central America. They lived in El Salvador for more than 10 years, trying to stretch her tiny pension from the Chicago Board of Education.
     “The only family he had was in El Salvador,” said Linda, while Manuel, 64, looked on. “He lets me do all of the talking because he can’t express himself that well.”
     They lived in San Salvador from 2009 until April 16.
     “We were helping his mom,” she said. Then his mother died. And the trouble began.

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Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia