Dear everyone,
I guess I will start off with some sad news. Ritu Ghai, one of my old residents from
Loyola, and a new colleague at Christ (she was at Rush for ten years) since May,
was informed last Tuesday that her ~70 year old dad had respiratory distress and had been admitted to the hospital with in
northwest India (about 8 an hour drive northwest of Delhi). Her dad was living in a house with her much
younger uncle, and the uncle’s kids, all who also had signs of Covid, but who
had recovered or were recovering. Her dad
received all of the treatment necessary (steroids, remdesivir, antibiotics
against a bacterial infection, anticoagulants), but his O2 saturation continued
to worsen, and he died on Saturday. This
is emotionally compounded by the fact that her mom died of pneumonia about 10
years ago. Two of her sibs travelled to
India, and they arrived there Thursday/Friday (she has two in the US and one in
Australia), but clearly Ritu is going to be out from work for a week or
two. It’s not easy to get all of the
paperwork necessary to travel there - - and I hope she will be able to re-enter
the US. She is antibody positive, so I
don’t think she will need to quarantine on her eventual return.
Otherwise, work is still slowly returning back to
normal. Maybe we are at about 80%
now. I am still able to leave most days
by 4:00, which feels very weird. I hope
we don’t have a spike in Covid cases (Illinois was getting close last week, but
the infection rate has dropped a bit) when the weather gets colder; that would
be devastating not only to the hospital system, but Chicago as a whole.
Nicola wrote a great letter about her adventures in
Oregon. This past week, she and Wes
moved into an air-conditioned hotel room for a few days when the smoke
pollution was at its worst, just to get some clean air to breath. They actually couldn’t travel either north to
Portland or south to California - - roads were closed on both sides of Eugene!
Jasper and Vivian got an elderly, gray, partially toothless cat from a Hyde
Park shelter. They renamed her Kevin
Portillo (Jasper has always had a roommate named Kevin, and Vivian is obsessed
with Portillo’s Italian beef sandwiches). Vivian is a couple of weeks into remote
classes at CMU. I know Lucas went
camping with Jacob and Christine in the last few weeks, but thankfully not when
the weather shifted from 90’s to snow and 30 degree weather in one day.
We finally were able to get hold of Gotterdammerung, the
last opera on Wagner’s ring cycle. We
missed the performance this spring at the Lyric, and so we saw the Met’s 2011
DVD recording. The set was pretty
amazing, although I read that there were some issues with it during the early
live performances. We watched an act
each day (each act is over an hour long).
It could be fun to see the whole cycle in Bayreuth over a short time
period someday. Joey mentioned a book he
was looking at about Wagner’s influence in history and the arts over the last
150 years, which sounds fascinating, with potential for being tedious.
Video wise I have been watching Midnight Diner (Owen, you
would like these!) on Netflix. I have
read some interesting books lately, including Daughter
of the Dark by the Duachenkos, The
Resisters by Gish Jen, and Robert Bennett Jackson’s second entry of his
second trilogy, Shorefall. I’ve just started a book about the WW2 in Papua
New Guinea, the Ghost
Mountain Boys. As usual, the US was
woefully unprepared. The grandfather of
one of my aikido friends was in this fight.
I’m off to have lunch with Roger and Andy to see the Bear’s
opener against the Lions. (In other sports, both the Cubs and White Sox are
first in their division with only a couple of weeks left in the Baseball
season. And the September sumo basho has
begun without either yokazuna!) Last Monday
we had dinner at 1261. The menu included
tomatillo (green) gazpacho, which Roger had been requesting for a while, along
with very tasty food from Sunset, including marinated flank steak. I need to double the amount of avocado in the
recipe I use for the gazpacho!.
Love, H.
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