Editorial: How will we remember this time? It's up to us
What is a community?
It's the parents who stand beside you on the sidelines and cheer your child's sports team. The women who've been in spin class with you for years. The co-workers you eat lunch with every day. The card groups and coffee buddies and book clubs and running teams and classes and civic committees and neighborhood groups and extended families that help define a person's place in the universe.
Now, settled in our homes for what's beginning to look like a not-quite-so-temporary break in our usual lives, we're realizing we have to think differently about how to nurture and be in our communities.
That's why we're particularly grateful to those who seem to have innately figured out the power of these connections and the small, helpful ways to keep them going.
You see it on social media, flung out there to friends of friends: "We are here to help with whatever you need. Groceries, a phone call, a virtual hug, we are here!"
A woman posts on a community Facebook page in search of disinfecting spray or wipes, then updates about "a wonderful soul" - a stranger - who answered the plea.
A friend sends flowers, just because.
A resident of a building in Buffalo Grove that is home to a lot of senior citizens leaves gift packages outside doors, each with a few rolls of toilet paper and a note offering to help with any need.
In Arlington Heights, some posted decorated shamrocks in their house windows for St. Patrick's Day so families with young children could make a game out of spotting them during walks.
In the Timberlake neighborhood north of Barrington, an Easter Bunny whose egg hunt was canceled is scheduling drive-by deliveries in which he'll wave to youngsters from his golf cart and leave baskets in driveways for them.
Declaring "the music will get us through this," Arcada Theatre President and CEO Ron Onesti offers free streaming shows nightly from the Arcada's St. Charles stage at arcadalive.com.
Yoga teachers livestream free classes.
Pet videos and penguins strolling through the shuttered Shedd Aquarium bring needed smiles.
This pandemic is a defining time of our generations. We will forever remember and tell stories about this time in history, and how we withstood the challenges.
Let's have those be stories of helpfulness, of caring, of little gifts of love and connection. It's easy to join in, with special care for the lonely and elderly, notes and letters, phone calls and offers of assistance, something simply to lighten the mood and brighten the day for others.
Maybe one side effect will be moving beyond this era's political vitriol to something bigger: a community responding to others' needs for caring and healing.
Maybe the one thing that will make us feel better, and less isolated, is to give a hand to one another.