We recently received a small package in the mail letting us know that we qualified for the Luxury Card. The presentation of this offer, intended to impress us, had several layers and looked like an invitation to a very elaborate wedding. The material extolled the benefits of this “luxury” card and implied that we were indeed very special people to have been “invited” to receive one.

While I don’t need a bank to tell me that we are “special people,” I was intrigued by this offer. Why were they offering such benefits as a “concierge”  and the ability to impress others with the distinctive look of the card? (I wanted to tell them that I have never known any store clerk to be in awe of mine or any other customer’s credit card.) If I wanted, they would rush me the new card so I could begin impressing others within the week.

Since I will read anything in front of me(I used to read the cereal box when I was a kid), I read the back of this exquisite offer. There, after noting the amazing interest rate of 24.99%, the very fine print told me that the annual fee for the card was $500. I felt extremely flattered.  I don’t know anyone who pays a $500 annual fee. That would certainly make us very special people indeed!

This is our home. It is paid for. We don’t carry a mortgage on it since we were brought up in the days that told us  to carry no debt into retirement. We heeded that advice despite constant advertisements over the years urging us to “refinance” to get “ready cash” to spend on “whatever you want.” A number of people we know who are our age(65-70) did just that. They “took money out of their house” to buy boats, vacation homes, trips and plastic surgery.

But of course, there is no “money in your house.” There is only the wonderful opportunity to once again carry a mortgage. And apparently not enough people, most especially us, have not jumped at the chance. Every week we receive offers to refinance. When I go into our bank to deposit money, the lovely young woman offers me a chance to refinance. I am encouraged that with a refinance my interest rate could go down. I carefully explain that since I have no mortgage, my current interest rate is 0%. Hard to beat that.

I was able to research the dismal statistics of borrowing at our age. 47% of people aged 65 owe more mortgage debt than they did in 2003. They bought into the fantasy that their home equaled “ready cash.” We just wanted to have a house to retire into. I guess I should just wear a button to the bank that says “Don’t ask me if I want to refinance.”

I was speaking with a friend Saturday about the large number of high school and college students who are beset with anxiety. I told her that I thought that things hadn’t changed much since I was in school, but she challenged my complacency. She said that many young people were obsessed with FOMO. I looked at her blankly, and she clarified–Fear Of Missing Out.

When I was that age, I had two means of finding out what was going on with my friends and others my age. One was personal observation and the other was the telephone. They were the sum total of my “social media.” Now, she told me, young people(and probably not so young people) have a constant fear of missing out on something. Either a news item, a bit of gossip, a YouTube video, a tweet, an Instagram or who knows what else.

In addition, they are continually looking at Facebook to see what everyone is up to(and apparently having every bit of information about them collected and sold by Facebook!) Since all of these are visual media, and since all are mediated through whatever lens the one posting wants, few of them are as complex as real life. Most selfies show happy, happy people eating wonderful food in exciting places with other happy, happy people.

For many years we used to receive Christmas letters extolling the accomplishments of each member of the distant family. We used to come up with parodies of those letters, recounting actual family life. We didn’t get a letter every day complete with photos. Perhaps if we had, we too would have been plagued with a real case of FOMO.

This was the scene by Sunday morning a few blocks from our apartment. The rest of the National Guard was camped in a nearby park, and we walked over to see the encampment. I have never forgotten the image of the soldiers camped out in a lovely Chicago park. That display of military force brought in against a civilian population–however much it might have been needed–chilled me. I did not feel reassured, but felt deeply uneasy.

I returned to college that Sunday afternoon and resumed my studies. We talked more about the Viet Nam War than about Dr. King, though he had also been vocally opposed to the War. On March 31 President Johnson had announced that he was not going to run for reelection, throwing the Democratic nominating process open. On my campus, students began to support Eugene McCarthy.

Little did I know that by August Chicago would once more be occupied by the National Guard as mayhem broke out at the Democratic National Convention. This time I stayed away!

We woke Saturday morning to the news that we had feared after smelling smoke last night. The mayor had called in the National Guard because violence had broken out in several Chicago neighborhoods including the one I was visiting. He had also ordered a curfew at dusk for anyone under 21. Since we were all under 21, it included us. I had been scheduled to leave town on Friday, but was still waiting for a safe time to leave.

We spent another day hunkered down. The fires were several blocks away and did not get any nearer to us than on Friday night. We had no idea of what was going on outside, beyond what we could hear on the radio and read in that morning’s paper.

Anyone who has been caught up in widespread violence knows how deeply unsettling it is. I had been a fairly carefree college junior just visiting that maybe boy friend. Suddenly I had found myself in the middle of rioting just a few blocks away. I had no idea when it would end or when I would be able to leave Chicago for my own college. And I had never felt so “white.” It didn’t matter that I deeply mourned King’s murder, supported civil rights, had picketed Governor Wallace when he ran for President, or had a diverse set of friends. All that was obvious was that I was out of place in that neighborhood. I stayed put.

We slept that night knowing little more than bits of information we heard on the radio. It is hard to realize in these days of instant communication that it took a while for news to get to people in 1968. Without a television, needing to stay put in the apartment with friends knowing no more than we did, we waited for the Friday newspaper to fill us in.

The news didn’t hit the newspaper until Friday morning, when we awoke to the headline above. At this point, things were still relatively calm in the neighborhood around us. However, we knew that things were not in their normal state. Something was off, and we could only guess what lay ahead over the weekend. As you can see from the newspaper above, President Johnson was appealing for calm and for nonviolence. Clearly he was anticipating that neither was assured.

We sat around on Friday talking about King, civil rights, injustice, and the events over the last five years since Kennedy’s assassination. Then we began to hear sirens.  We could look at the apartment windows and see smoke a couple of blocks away,

I was scared. We decided to stay away from the windows and wait to see what would happen next.

April 4, 1968 was a clear blue sky day in Chicago, and I left my friends’ apartment in the south Chicago neighborhood of Woodlawn to visit my grandparents. They lived on the north shore of Lake Michigan, and I walked to the El stop and took the train to their apartment. I hadn’t seen them since the fall of 1965 when I had stopped on my way to college, and we had a wonderful time catching up with one another. My grandfather showed me the flowers he had had someone plant at the base of their high rise. That way, he said, your grandmother can see them from the window. While it was officially called “The Old Peoples’ Home,” their apartment was comfortable and full of old furniture I remembered from their Buffalo home.

I left there and took the El back to my friends’ house late in the afternoon. When I got off the train to walk to the apartment, something seemed off. There were groups of young black men standing on street corners, and no one else was outside. I skirted the men and arrived at the apartment. When I walked in I was greeted with hugs and someone saying, “Thank God you are all right.”

They had heard on the radio–the apartment had no television–that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis. “Disturbances” were already beginning in Chicago, and they were concerned about me. We gathered around the radio and listened until we heard that he had died. Deeply shaken, we shared memories of the murder of President Kennedy when we were in high school. We wondered what this murder would mean for the country. What would it mean for Chicago? What would it mean for us?

Fifty years ago today, I was a college junior on spring vacation. I had flown to Chicago to visit a friend who attended the University of Chicago. He was a friend/maybe to-be boy friend. When I arrived I found out it was just going to be friend, which was fine with me. He lived in an apartment with two roommates in a predominately black neighborhood, though he and his friends were white. Students from the University commonly lived in his neighborhood.

The weather was lovely, the company fine. We sat out on the upstairs porch, played loud music and cooked shared meals. We were all on break from our studies and spring was just breaking out for real.

It was April 3, 1968. All was quiet. All was good.

When I was a kid we didn’t live within walking distance to any stores. I only got candy three times a year: Halloween, Christmas(and only candy canes) and Easter. My family was not religious and Easter was all about sugar. The story was that the Easter bunny came in the night and filled the baskets we had left on the sofa for him(her?). Even after I was old enough to know the truth, I had to stay quiet since my youngest sibling was eight years younger than I was.

Our haul on Easter was very specific. We got jelly beans, miniature jelly beans, foil wrapped chocolates in a container such as pictured above and one chocolate rabbit. Solid chocolate, not just a chocolate shell. If Peeps had been invented, we were unaware of them. The Easter bunny had carefully put exactly the same number of things in each basket. We knew this because we counted each jelly bean and chocolate.

We would swap jelly beans with one another. I craved the black ones, and fortunately none of my siblings liked them. I was able to trade with my despised green ones. Then we embarked on the opposite of an eating contest. That is, we raced to see who would resist eating the rabbit first. Then we argued about whether eating the ears counted if the rest of the bunny remained intact. With four of us, we were pretty well able to argue most of the day.

Today Easter is about the story of Christ with a very long Vigil Mass on Easter Eve, complete with “smells and bells” as non Catholics say. But in my childhood, it was all about the candy.