“For the vast majority of you already taking precautions, your lives will not change very much,” Governor J. B. Pritzker March 2020
In this sore affliction and misery of our city, the reverend authority of the laws, both human and divine, was all in a manner dissolved and fallen into decay, for [lack of] the ministers and executors thereof, who, like other men, were all either dead or sick or else left so destitute of followers that they were unable to exercise any office, wherefore every one had license to do whatsoever pleased him. Many others held a middle course between the two aforesaid, not straitening themselves so exactly in the matter of diet as the first neither allowing themselves such license in drinking and other debauchery as the second, but using things in sufficiency, according to their appetites; nor did they seclude themselves, but went about, carrying in their hands, some flowers, some odoriferous herbs and other some4 divers kinds of series,[7] which they set often to their noses, accounting it an excellent thing to fortify the brain with such odours, more by token that the air seemed all heavy and attainted with the stench of the dead bodies and that of the sick and of the remedies used. Giovanni Boccaccio Decameron 1492
Along the Northwest Indiana shoreline sits a rosary of beach communities hugging the evaporating shores of Lake Michigan, which has burglarized the sandy real estate, as is its wont every thirty years.
This year was special as the Great Lake flung iits doors open to an air-borne global pestilence - Covid 19. In one of these beads of the affluent rosary sat the get-away home of Martin Dioneo.
Martin Dioneo operated a real estate realm that included most of the prime suburban properties on the Chicago metropolitan necklace - Barrington, Winnetka, Wilmette, Hawthorn Woods, Glencoe and many holdings in Beverly touching on Longwood Drive, Hyde Park along the Midway and Evanston near Sheridan Road. Martin Dioneo rubbed shoulders with the John Bucks and Jim Carlins, but was quite a few pegs below their august places on the urban corporate taxonomy. Martin Dioneo was beyond comfortable, but retained his working class sensibilities honed to the heel of his moral blade, as opposed to the point. He respected a working man, but what do his damnedest to avoid actually putting spade to soil. Martin's father had been a lumber man and very successful one in Bridegport and later Evergreen Park, Illinois. It was lumber that allowed Martin to make his foray into the cut-throat world of urban and suburban real estate development. Martin Dioneo was felled by a bug that originated in Wuhan China, because someone wanted to eat a bat.
Martin was a member of the East Bank Club, until he had his apartment building
on East Lake Shore Drive fitted out with the latest and greatest physical fitness equipment and a personal trainer from Lapland in Finland to bully-rag and encourage him through his ever changing regimen of workouts. Gaelbu , Martin's Sami trainer from the great state of Ustjoki, travelled to Paris over the Christmas Holidays and was infected with the Covid 19 bug and brought the affliction home to Martin Dioneo - Et in Arcadia, Ego! Also, in high-priced real estate along Chicago's Lake Front.
In early March of 2020, Martin Dioneo was in the isolation unit of Northwestern University Hospital.
Martin's wife Allyson sent her son Wesley, a senior at St. Ignatius College Prep to their vacation home at Stop 30 in Long Beach, Indiana, to wait out the plague.
Wesley Dioneo was a very popular young man who had only just been accepted to begin classes at Yale in the fall of 2020.
While Martin struggled for breath on the ventilator at Northwestern Med Center, and Allyson hunkered down on East Lake Shore Drive, Wesley could be trusted with the keys to the family vacation compound in Indiana.
What to do?
Coming up next - Wesley operates the garage doors and lets in a half score of privileged young people for beers and home-made stories.
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