Both Brooks and Cliff Lewis — at 65 the youngest — are choral singers. Lewis is part of a ski club that travels by bus to New York ski resorts. Career coach Ann Hunter, the only member of the group still working, is an animal shelter volunteer. Former college professor Kermit Lind is active in his church. Everybody traveled.
Bob Humrick, a retired chemist who has survived cancer, had a slate of trips planned for 2020, to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. He and his wife were going to Asheville and Charlotte in North Carolina, Maine and New York. "We were going all over the place, to see friends, to do things we had always wanted to do," he said.
Now he gets takeout coffee each day at the Phoenix, but mostly stays in. One weekend, he and his wife drove through Little Italy, a trendy restaurant district in Cleveland, to watch people at sidewalk tables doing what they couldn’t. “In a way, it was a bad idea,” he said. “It just smelled so good.”
The group misses concerts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, lectures at Trinity Episcopal Church, movies and going to the public library to browse the newspaper collection and check out books. They miss inviting people to dinner, and bemoan the need to vet guests if they do. “Like, do they have a secret college kid stashed somewhere?” said Brooks, laughing.
Ray Elsoffer, 70, hooked up with the coffee group three decades ago when he owned a vacuum repair shop down the street. Because he and his wife have health risks, they no longer see grandchildren they used to watch two days a week, or dine at their son’s house twice a month.
“The saving grace is because it’s summertime," Elsoffer says. “I can get outdoors, do yard work. I work on a project car, a 1930 Model A Ford.”
“Sometimes we take walks. Sometimes we go for a ride up to Lake Erie. We look at the lake for a half hour and come home.”
Most said they think the virus will keep them cooped up until at least mid-2021 and probably longer. They dread winter.
The Phoenix Phellows’ youngest member brought the group to Zoom.
“We were realizing that we might not be able to meet at the coffee shop anymore, and I jokingly suggested we do it online,” Lewis said. “I was not expecting much. It’s an older group, not very tech savvy.”
About seven now meet on Zoom at 8 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for a 90-minute mixture of laughter, personal updates and wistfulness. Lewis paid for the extra time, figuring it cost the same as the Phoenix’s coffee.
At a Sept. 14 Zoom meeting, Park Goist, 84, said he and his wife went to an arthouse theater for a documentary on Jimmy Carter. One other person was there.
Others were still not chancing it, including Moore, who shared a dream she’d had.
She’d awakened oddly happy, with “a feeling like when you are going to a party and you’re excited. I woke up with that feeling about Covid, that it was about to be gone. Then I really woke up,” she said. “It was such a letdown.”
“Do you think we will ever go back to the Phoenix?”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.