WEEK OF TOGETHERNESS, WORRY, NEW TRADITIONS
Across city and suburbs, residents striving to make the best of a bad situation
Faced with a government order to stay home, a family of five in Oak Park made the best of their unexpected time together by competing on their backyard basketball hoop each afternoon.
A retired great-grandmother in the Kenwood neighborhood worried about whether she could go through with her international travel plans. With nowhere to go, she did some reading she’d put off and packed away her winter clothes.
A retired South Loop teacher took advantage of the empty sidewalks to take his dog for long walks, encountering few people aside from joggers who came too close for comfort, considering the times.
They were among the millions throughout Illinois forced to adjust their lives in the week since Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a directive that closed many workplaces, scuttled events and required folks to largely stay home.
People hunkered down and waited to see the benefits of a drastic action designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even if the order couldn’t prevent those already infected from getting sick. In the week after the decree, the number of reported cases quadrupled and deaths increased nearly sixfold.
Not everyone treated the rules as seriously as they were intended. And so after almost a week of warnings, an incensed Mayor Lori Lightfoot closed the Lakefront Trail and other recreational hot spots as cops who had taken a hands-off approach started enforcing the order more aggressively.
Those concerns extended beyond Chicago as neighbors monitored one another and didn’t always like what they saw. One woman in Naperville said she called the cops to report 100 or so people gathered near Knoch Knolls Park on Wednesday. The crowds eventually thinned, but some
young people still headed back to the park, she said.
“Our barrier to this pandemic is only as strong as our weakest link,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.
While some tested the limits outside, people adjusted to life lived mostly indoors. They experimented with their facial hair, hung pictures of bears in their windows for kids to see and sang Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” out windows.
Many shifted their professional lives to their homes, but less fortunate people lost their paychecks and struggled with paying the bills. Still others — from cops to health care workers to cooks — reported to work despite the danger.
Across the city and suburbs, people voiced their worry, as well as their determination to make the best of a bad situation and maintain community amid the anxiety and sadness.
Whatever else was going on, the Cotter family of Oak Park — wife Carrie, husband Matt and three kids from fourth grade to high school — gathered in the late afternoon under a backyard basketball hoop for a game of “knockout,” a competitive shooting game.
“We always complain about how there’s never enough time, and you wish time would stand still and they’re growing up too fast,” said Carrie Cotter, a lawyer now trying to find space to work from home. “So in that sense, if you have your basic needs taken care of, there’s something kind of nice about it. I recognize that it’s really lucky to be able to view extra time with everybody as a good thing.”
Fellow Oak Parker Bill Parkinson noted the merits of living in a neighborhood where the homes are close together. His teen daughters have been “out back with the kids next door, doing tie-dye, each on their respective porches.”
“My neighbor told me that he was invited over to somebody’s house, and they had a fire pit in the middle of the yard, and they had marked out places that people could stand. And then they handed them a Ziploc bag with a (local) Kinslahger beer in it. And they stood around the fire pit at a very long distance and shot the breeze,” said Parkinson, a Field Museum anthropologist and University of Illinois at Chicago professor. “That part is fun, right?”
As people sought safe ways to be together, Rosita Wood worried about the future of her pastime — travel. Her trips were a gift to herself after years of caring for her ill mother and husband.
Before the virus hit, she had been planning jaunts to places including Switzerland and Australia.
“I’m really hesitant as far as giving my money (for the trips) because I don’t know what’s going to happen at this point,” said the Kenwood resident. “I’m really frightened, hesitant or whatever you want to call it, (because) this virus is still floating around.”
Still, Wood, a retired social worker and business owner, tried to make prowanted ductive use of her days by catching up on old magazine articles and packing winter clothes away. She hadn’t ventured out for groceries since the stay-athome order was instituted, however.
Similarly, Alan Robinson was trying to get used to the new normal in the South Loop.
“I’m very much used to, ‘Oh, you need an onion? I’ll be back in five minutes,’” he said. “Now, I can look out my window and see the
Trader Joe’s. But, you know, it’s just out of my reach.”
The 66-year-old retired teacher spent some of his time strolling on largely empty sidewalks.
“I’m getting a lot of steps in every day walking the dog, just walking around the neighborhood and steering clear of people — and for the most part people steer clear of me. Except joggers, I have to say, who seem to not have a problem coming up beside you, huffing and puffing and coming within a foot,” he said.
That desire for social distance has birthed new traditions, as in Evanston, where neighbors in the 800 block of Madison Street have started a “Six Feet at Six” check-in at the ends of their driveways around 6 p.m. Organizer Emma Daisy said she was inspired by videos of homebound Italians joining together in song.
“I have a 3-year-old who loves to sing songs,” Daisy said of her son, Lewis. “We to sing and play the ukulele for everyone.”
Some residents walk their dogs or wander up and down the block to say hello to those who don’t live next door. However, “we’re definitely trying to maintain the distancing,” Daisy said.
Crises look different from different perspectives. Evanston mom Danira Dizdarevic, who fled war-torn Sarajevo a quarter-century ago, said she told her kids that “we survived genocide, you can survive two weeks of lockdown.”
Her husband, Elvir, is a truck driver, and his job is considered essential, so he was on the road working, she said. Meanwhile, she has watched over their teenage children as they studied, gardened and wrote letters. Mina, a senior at Evanston Township High School, “cried for days” when she learned her water polo season likely would not continue, Danira Dizdarevic said. The mother told the daughter to “be realistic.”
“Let’s pray you can go to prom,” said Dizdarevic, an assistant director of gift planning at Northwestern University.
After a morning of elearning, Nicole Schindlbeck ushered her three children outside to pick up trash along a large pond near their Aurora home. Using litter grabbers they received for Christmas, the family filled one large bag with garbage and another with recyclables. Nine-year-old Mayson even saved a little fish trapped in plastic.
“We’re trying to think of it as spring break,” said Schindlbeck, who cleaned up along with Jason, 14, and Madison, 12. “The days don’t go by very fast.”
“I want to help them realize that we all could do a little part during the pandemic, even if it’s just picking up litter or helping the environment,” she said.
It might seem like writers and artists, who tend to work at home, would notice little difference in their professional lives during a stayat-home order. Not so for Jefferson Park mystery writer Lori Rader-Day, who canceled about 15 events planned in support of her new novel, “The Lucky One,” but struggled to capitalize on the free time.
“My attention span is a little weak at the best of times, but now it has shattered,” she wrote in an email. “I’m having trouble reading anything that requires my full attention or even watching television that asks too much of me.”
Keir Graff, who pens fiction for children and adults at his Buena Park home, explained the predicament fellow writers have described to him.
“The thing they most craved — more time to write — hasn’t been the blessing they hoped for,” he wrote. “For me, the way to cope is to make myself as busy as possible — I’m at my most productive when I feel there aren’t enough hours in the day.”
Logan Square visual artist Jason Brammer said he’d put some murals and commercial projects on hold, and he worried for people in the service and entertainment industries taking hits to their livelihoods. A Buddhist, he noted that a crisis marked by economic suffering and physical isolation — and one whose containment depends on cooperation — showed how much people count on one another.
“This is a forceful example of interdependence,” he said.
Despite the many negatives, Humboldt Park artist and musician Ben Ezra said he felt “an internal sense of joy and peace” and was happy to be healthy, even if he was mostly stuck in his home.
Ezra said he was looking forward to returning to his usual Friday evening haunt, the Empty Bottle, for its live country music show. When the pandemic ends, Ezra said, he imagined people who have been connected by technology might “long for something real.”
“They’ll long to see another human face, and hug each other more,” he said.