Bob Jenkins

Bob Jenkins, moved back to Evanston in 2017 a long block from where I spent a couple of childhood years in the 1950’s. Since winning a $1000 prize for the essay I submitted in 1966: “Why I Want to Go to College”, I’d only written bureaucratic drivel. Now, I attempt serious and intended-to-be humorous essays, poems, and stories.

The Healing Issue

In a flash I felt, warm, fuzzy, at ease

A veritable goodness and wellness machine.

I’d submit a writing for “The Healing Issue”

Of my library’s Literary Magazine.

Why healing today?

“Hip, Hip, Hurrah!”

Covid’s away…?

No way, No way.

Savvily it wasn’t named “The Healed Issue”

Fighting through falsehood fired smokescreens

Many heroes carried the load

and the bloodletting slowed

Stanched by quarantines, masks, and vaccines.

Yet, inflammation, fever, and hot tempers persist

As Covid passes from pandemic to endemic

Thickening the scar tissue of

Humanity’s Congestive Heart Disease.

Having got that off my chest,

I feel so much less distressed.

Unmasked Thoughts

Early 2016 only Asians sported masks on Evanston streets

and amidst commuters on the CTA.

I assumed their masks were to protect others.

Millenia of concern for their elders, youngers,

their societies, their worlds.

Raised on sermons of Manifest Destiny

And celebration of individualism over difference

This alien concern for others had been named

“Hive mentality”, not empathy, not social consciousness.

That spring I traveled to Korea and Japan

where some even jogged and bicycled masked.

I returned to America’s freedom from sympathy,

where,

Nov 8, 2016, voters chose antipathy over empathy.

Covid 2019 turned The Cold-pathy’s War hot.

Pandemic was inconvenient yet

Not without benefits:

Savings increased

Carbon reduced

Man hugs ceased.

Covid also encouraged my anti-social tendencies

I enjoyed walking far to the right

And far to the left

Or across the street.

My smile was masked as I danced away from others.

I hope I’m not jinxed noting the biggest benefit:

Not since 2018, If then,

Have I had any sort of cold or flu.

A record string of years unsick.

The mask mandates may have abated,

but mine’s handy and vaccines updated.

It’s not over, just moderated.

Everyone’s a bit immunocompromised.