AROUND TOWN: “Love, Life and Death in the Age of Coronavirus,” the Georgalas-Burke Letters

Robert N. Georgalas and I have been friends since 1993 when we met in the graduate fiction writing program at Columbia College Chicago. We now live 8.1 miles apart. Bob and his wife, Joanne Pepe, live downtown, off Millennium Park in a neighborhood newly dubbed Lakeshore East while my husband, Robert Charles, and I live on the city’s north side in Edgewater. The four of us are close friends.

Before the pandemic, our lives were filled with conversations over lunches and dinners at Miller’s Pub and Greek Islands as well as the occasional mid-afternoon coffee at the Starbuck’s on the ground level of the Palmer House Hotel. Now, due to the pandemic, our lives are bound together with a lively correspondence between Bob and me.

Since the COVID lockdowns and home-exiles began in March 2020, Bob and I have exchanged more than 50 letters. Typed, double-spaced, sent via email as attached Word documents, the letters have informed, illuminated, and deepened our 27-year friendship in surprising ways. The epistles have covered many of the same topics our face-to-face conversations did pre-pandemic; but the letters also elicited more details and nuances than conversations permit. Putting words to paper allowed for us a more thoughtful exchange and revealed an even deeper intimacy.

Thumbing through them now, tens of thousands of words across several hundreds of pages, I’m struck by the topics we’ve discussed: worries about ill family and friends; childhood memories, good and bad; recollections of influential teachers and mentors; jokes; discussions about whether all art is political; reflections on capitalism and the pandemic’s economic carnage; rants about criminal, conservative politicians; observations on the struggles for equity and cancel culture; intriguing obsessions with American Westerns, Formula One racing films, and author cameos in films of their books. Our letters also feature winding thoughts on hundreds of books, movies and pieces of music as well as asides on everything from French literary scandals to a recent Space X launch. On paper, we traveled from Key West to Manhattan, from Paris to San Francisco, from ancient Greece to Chaucer’s England. Of course, our letters also contain talk of the coronavirus – sharing first-hand accounts from friends in Tuscany and Manhattan, both hit hard early on; the dreaded witnessing of rising infection and mortality rates across the United States; the preventable yet politically inevitable sweep of the killer virus into rural America; the welcome arrival of vaccines. In the letters, Bob and I have been candid, too, about our own struggles with fatigue and depression.

So, is this correspondence a personal silver lining in this global pandemic? I wouldn’t go that far because I wouldn’t want to give the pandemic and its Trumpian mismanagement any credit for anything good. Instead, I cherish the letters as a testament to resilience – and a celebration of an old, nearly lost way of deepening friendship, understanding one’s self and seeing the world around us.