Reading, writing...that's what I do.

People of Means by Nancy Johnson

When a writer has a writer friend who has climbed the mountain and published TWO amazing novels with New York publishing companies, WOW. 

For me, that friend is Nancy Johnson, author of THE KINDEST LIE, a Book of the Month Club selection and a Target Book Club Pick…and recently, PEOPLE OF MEANS, a William Morrow novel. 

I met Nancy at a Writing Retreat sponsored by Women’s Fiction Writers Association, or as it came to be known, WFWA. When we realized we were both Chicagoans, a bond formed. When her first novel was published, I immediately purchased a copy and wrote a review. Breaking into New York publishing is no easy task. Nancy’s second book meant some changes…a different publishing company for one. But like all writers, when we believe in our work…we do not give up. 

This novel is a close-up history of characters caught in the battle for civil rights. 

Johnson writes: One little Black girl, who had to be no more than five years old, with  pigtails and barrettes on the ends of her hair, carried a sign almost as big as she was. It read: END RACISM SO I CAN GROW UP. TV and newspaper photographers crouched on the ground in front of her to capture what had made so many people stop and take notice. The girl posed, enjoying the attention. 

Nancy Johnson and I were both born and raised in Chicago, her novel addressing movements and problems that she experienced and I did not. 

One of the characters in PEOPLE of MEANS explains: “I’ll tell you what it’s like. I’m a single mother. It’s just the two of us, and Falana has no where to play, no where that’s safe to run around and be a child. She climbs in bed with me when gunshots go off. She takes cold showers at night because we don’t have hot water. The city has never done anything about that.”

This is Johnson using her characters to relate how things were, to underline and make history personal and human. Which is what we readers NEED, so that we can fully understand the struggle Black people endured in this country for decades.

In the novel a White man threatens, “They string y’all up on trees here in Tennessee and bring the whole family out to watch.” This, and then: “Travis Lee slid one finger covered in black grease down the front of Gerald’s freshly laundered white shirt.”

Soon after Johnson writes: Gerald opened and closed his hands, inhaling deeply. He was still alive, but the man had sapped his spirit, making him feel low like some creature that crawled underneath your shoe. Gerald turned his anger inward. Why had he gotten ahead of himself, letting his hopes rise higher than his station in this world? Gerald stood next to his dead car, the exhaust from Travis Lee’s station wagon covering him in gray haze. 

YES, Nancy Johnson knows how to end a chapter, leave us in a world of sadness and anger. Yes, she writes of those things in the past…but we all know that in many places this evil, this prejudice still exists. It should make every person wake up and fight for equality for everyone of us.   

Years ago, I benefitted from a Pullman Scholarship to help pay for my college degree. Johnson’s character Darius says: “As long as Pullman porters have been transporting money for the MOVEMENT, we’ve never had reports of any of them stealing. It’s hard to explain, but ones who do it treat this as a scared duty, an honor. Those men don’t even tell their wives about this.”

Yes, this is history, this is Johnson writing about Chicago, about prejudice, about the struggle to live a good life. Johnson’s skill is having characters from the past COME ALIVE for us on the page. People of means is history, struggle punctuated with LOVE, STRENGTH and surprising conclusions. Nancy Johnson’s latest novel is a MUST READ.  

Fiction…..A Very Short Story: The Result

Angela is in love. But HE doesn’t know it. At least Angela is pretty sure. She sees him once a week when she goes for the therapy…having a bad knee has become fun.

Angela sits at the edge of the table, watching him. His hands touch her kneecap, the back of her calf. His hands are warm, his eyes….she waits. They sometimes talk.

She knows she is waiting for the knee to get better, but also waiting for him to see if anything lies between them, in the silences. They talk of exercises, how to go up and down stairs…body mechanics. He says words to her like femur, soft tissue.

In the car driving home, she listens to the radio, has it loud, vigorous in her ears. But also his words, “Let’s see how you do this week. You’ll be okay.”

But in some ways she is not okay. She thinks of him, plans what they will talk about, considers that maybe her knee isn’t getting better, because her mind doesn’t want it to.

She turns down other opportunities, using her knee as an excuse. At some level she knows that’s crazy. It’s all crazy. He is married and she…what chance does she have…soon her knee will heal; then she reminds herself to make a new appointment.

In four weeks, he is ready to dismiss her. Feeling foolish, she smiles at him, goes through the motions, flexes her knee, lets her leg rock back and forth…the knee working, her calf hitting the deep edge of the table. He stops writing, reaching out to grab her leg, stop these unnecessary movements.

They don’t speak, though they are looking at each other. Soon his hand drops away. Her therapy is done, it’s over. He’s given her the help she needed and what she came for.

As she slides off the table, he taps her knee one last time, because now she is pain-free…right?

She tries to say something like Thank You…forgets herself, has to smile, has to walk away.

Analyzing THE PIT…Jennifer Obel

Dr. Jennifer Obel is a retired oncologist who writes about the intersection of medicine, ethics and public policy. This piece appeared in THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE. 

In between patients at my oncology clinic, I couldn’t catch my breath. I asked my nurse to check my oxygen level and pulse. My chest felt heavy, as if something were pressing on it.

I sat in the same examination chair my patients use, watching the monitor and running through possible diagnoses. But I knew what this was.

A panic attack. My mother had just called. While she felt fine, her routine CT scan showed fluid around her lung. I didn’t need anyone to explain what it meant. I’m an oncologist. Pleural effusion, in this context, is definitive: It meant her cancer had spread.

She didn’t know yet. I did. Over the next two years, as she lived with Stage IV lung cancer, I moved between my roles as daughter and doctor, managing my own patients and quietly absorbing her suffering. The message from my oncology division was clear: Keep working. There was no space to feel.

That expectation is not incidental. It is structural. The system holds because the people inside it are asked to absorb more than they should.

That’s why a scene in the HBO medical drama “The Pitt” stopped me.

She didn’t know yet. I did. Over the next two years, as she lived with Stage IV lung cancer, I moved between my roles as daughter and doctor, managing my own patients and quietly absorbing her suffering. The message from my oncology division was clear: Keep working. There was no space to feel.

That expectation is not incidental. It is structural. The system holds because the people inside it are asked to absorb more than they should. That’s why a scene in the HBO medical drama “The Pitt” stopped me.

D.Rr. Samira Mohan is dealing with a chaotic emergency department while fielding calls from her mother. The pace is relentless. Her body gives way to chest pain, sweating and a sense of impending doom. She is triaged as a patient. But it isn’t a heart attack.

When she returns to her duties, Dr. Robby, the attending physician, dismisses it as “mommy issues.” It was one of the first times I felt seen, and it came from a TV show.

“The Pitt” reflects the failures of our health care system — overcrowded emergency rooms, too few doctors and too many patients. It shows an uninsured patient who is suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis, a condition in which blood sugar spirals out of control, but who leaves before his treatment is complete because he cannot afford to stay. It shows a son who drives for more than an hour so his critically ill father can get dialysis after they discover their local hospital has closed.

But what the show captures with unusual insight is something more fundamental. “The Pitt” reveals not just what the system lacks, but the self-sacrifice required of the medical team in order for health care to stay afloat. Medicine does not just demand our competence as professionals. It demands that we ignore ourselves and our needs, even when the personal cost is high.

In a recent episode of “The Pitt,” a student doctor who leaves promptly at the end of her shift instead of working over tells a senior resident that 60% of emergency physicians report burnout. Hers is a quiet act of refusal. Because in medicine, the expectation is that we should stay through exhaustion, personal crisis and the slow erosion of self we are trained to ignore.

Every part of medicine functions this way. The emergency department is just where the strain is most visible. In the operating room, care depends on layers of people — nurses, anesthesiologists, surgical technicians, assistants — contributing a different piece of the whole. Oncology clinics run on the same coordination, as do inpatient teams.

It is less like a hierarchy than an orchestra, each person entering at the right moment. There is little margin for error. When one note is missed, whether from fatigue, overload or distraction, the entire performance begins to unravel.

“The Pitt” is filmed the same way, the camera moving continuously from one person to the next, as if there is no pause in the system. Burnout is not simply an individual condition. It is the predictable result of a system that operates without a buffer.

Health care redistributes strain. When one physician is exhausted, others compensate. When a nurse is stretched too thin, someone else absorbs the delay. To patients, the system appears relatively intact because the people in it bend to keep it that way. But when enough people are depleted at the same time, what appears to be an isolated error is often the predictable result of a system pushed past its capacity.

“The Pitt” lays bare these pressures. In the first season, a charge nurse takes a break outside from a relentless shift. A disgruntled patient follows her and punches her in the face, knocking her to the ground. She returns to work.

In the second season, a patient under the influence wraps his arm around a young nurse’s neck and chokes her until the charge nurse intervenes. Though shaken, the novice nurse insists on finishing her shift. There is no pause long enough to process what happened and no space for recovery.

I have done this myself. Years ago, I had a nonviable pregnancy and chose a surgical termination — not because it was an emergency but because it fit around my clinic schedule. I saw nine patients that morning before driving to my gynecologist’s office for the procedure. I returned to work the next day without time to mourn. It was practical. I did not feel I could risk miscarrying at work because of the pain, the bleeding and the disruption it would cause me and my patients.

This is what medicine teaches: Endure hardship and organize your life around the expectation that patient care is paramount. While we call resilience a strength, it is often a requirement that does damage over time. The system depends on people carrying on without time to recover or reflect.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, there is a painting I often return to: pointillist Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” It depicts a calm afternoon along the Seine River in Paris. But step toward it, and the image dissolves into tens of thousands of points, which you can see only up close.

“The Pitt” is that way, too. From a distance, the system seems coherent. Up close, it becomes clear that the system depends on individuals taking on more than they should, persisting when they should be allowed to stop and breathe.

Art preserves a moment by showing a historical portrayal of how people lived. It does not have to define the future.

MEMORIES of Margaret in the Garden

When one green shoot suddenly appeared in my garden, I took a photo of it, posted it on social media.

I didn’t get a huge response, but readers did immediately respond. SPRING is a meaningful time for many of us, the air is warmer, rains are welcome, and we find ourselves being called OUTSIDE. Surely, many of you live in climates where SRING means little. And that is lovely. When we were in California recently, we played croquet, took walks and flew kites. AWESOME.

But now we are home in Illinois, and the arrival of SPRING is always very welcome. The sun is soft, the air is warm, and we are once again called outside. The feeling of lightness, of eagerness to watch green shoots pierce the ground is part of living in temperate climates.

It’s a call to nature, a call to breathing in the scents and sounds of SPRING. Children suddenly appear, shout out to one another. Adults are eager to walk the dog, extend that walking time….share a smile when approaching anyone out for the spring stroll. And yes, the arrival of  spring and warm weather is more meaningful to people who live in temperate climates. Spring is a gift of change, of adventure and the longing to be outside. But it is also a reminder of work that needs to be done: wow my windows need to be washed, my garden planted, my bedding changed…time to put away those heavy quilts. A busy time, but also a welcome time….because humans thrive on change, on awakening to time in the garden.

Elizabeth Kelsey, who moved from Florida to New Hampshire, wrote in her piece in TIME: I can trust that longer, lighter days will inevitably return. I can navigate change.” Which is always good thing for all of us to learn.

My Aunt Margaret was a true gardener. A writer and editor for a publishing company, I believe she was never happier when she could “work in the garden.” Spring meant clearing away winter debris, waiting to see what perennials had made it through another Chicago winter. Then she would  make several trips to the Singler Florist. I imagine that some days she walked there, the shop being a block away. I also imagine there were cheerful conversations with Bob or his mother…they not only being avid gardeners but also Margaret’s cousins. They admired her garden, were eager to show her a new rose or a perennial shrub that might fill an empty space near the western end of the garden.

And when I, as a child, found a small plot of soil along our driveway and mentioned it to Margaret, she was eager to help me choose some annuals that might encourage me to also become a gardener. I never earned the gravitas that Margaret did. But in a few weeks, when I am out in the garden…weeding, raking and getting ready to plant, I will think of her, how happy she alway was, down on her knees, planting…which I have come to realize is something very simple and basic: in our family, we all just LOVE digging in the dirt.

How Beautiful with Shoes or Without

In my past, I spent hours in the shoe store, not because it’s my absolute thing to do, but because when going on long walks, I wear bulky orthotics in my shoes, and have to make sure all will fit properly. It takes time and makes me jealous of ladies who can wear tiny ballet slippers that give one’s foot absolutely no support…or torturous heels that attempt to reshape the foot during the hours one wears them. I guess there were years when I squandered my chances to be like those ladies.

In the seventh grade, the cusp of life when girls want to shed bulky clothing, shy ways and morph into the first stage of womanhood, I was having foot problems. The lost-in-the-old-ways doc that my mother took me to, not only removed a growth on the bottom of my foot using a very painful process, he also ordered my mother to put me in oxfords. For the younger crowd, these are shoes like men might wear, or women who care nothing about fashion. They are leather with stiff soles and ties, and are usually black or brown. I must have still been under the influence of the painkillers my mother gave me after the doc shot the bottom of my foot with some form of acid, because I agreed to a pair of cherry red oxfords. And I subsequently wore these shoes to school, in the seventh grade!

That’s why Jack D. came up to me at our years later reunion, and told me that he’d had a crush on me in junior high, but he just could not get beyond those red shoes.  Damn! Even he remembered them. I don’t know what shoes I was wearing that night, but I can assure you they weren’t oxfords. I moved from those red shoes to saddle shoes, and then quietly relied on my mother’s busy life to blot out the doctor’s warning that I had weak arches or something!! I can still remember the elegantly thin loafers I wore in high school with my white crew socks folded way down to reveal my ankles.

Ah yes, I had years of wonderful carefree shoes—woven flats in various colors, dyed poisdeseau for every prom dress or dance ensemble, also sandals that revealed lots of skin, and heels that were chunky or spindly depending on the style of the season.

But most of all, years and years of walking around barefoot. I always cleaned my house in my bare feet, even in winter. I don’t really know why—I guess I thought I moved faster.

But those years caught up with me. Chronic foot pain led to the discovery of a stretched tendon. Surgery was mentioned, but the orthotics I had to wear protected that tendon. And foot surgery is always an ify choice.

Now I often wear gym shoes. But I still cheat and wear little shoes for holidays and evenings out with friends…though trips to the shoe store will never be the same.

Bottom line, I can still throw on a pair of athletic shoes and walk for miles. No complaints. I just wonder if I would have stuck with more-supportive shoes my entire life—maybe if those oxfords hadn’t been RED! How beautiful a thought.