By retirement age, many people want to have established relationships with healthcare providers. I’m changing both my doctor and my dentist — one by choice, the other because she retired.

Switching to a Rush Health physician makes sense: Rush has a spanking new clinic a half-mile from me, and it now accepts my Medicare Advantage plan. I read online reviews of the doctors at 1411 South Michigan and chose one in less than a half-hour. The reviews praising her people skills leave me expecting to be pleased when I meet her next month.

I used to think that choosing a dentist was less complicated than choosing a doctor. I didn’t care whether I liked the dentist’s personality. Rapport didn’t matter so much. Embarrassing topics would not be on the table, not that I’d be talking with a scaler in my mouth. Treatment was unlikely to be a matter of life and death.

In recent years I came to realize that choosing a dentist isn’t so straightforward, especially when those whom friends recommend aren’t in one’s insurance network. Online reviewers tend to talk about whether the dentist is gentle and has a courteous staff — not so much about whether the dentist prefers proactive treatment or watchful waiting.

Saying “proactive treatment” is giving the benefit of the doubt to dentists who come up with myriad problems to treat. The uncharitable description is money grubbing.

That there are different approaches to treatment was brought home to me when I moved downtown and decided to change to a dental practice nearby. There I was told that I grind my teeth and would eventually lose them if I didn’t buy a night guard costing hundreds of dollars; that I had six precavities (“incipient caries”) that should be filled; that I needed three crowns, two to replace existing crowns; and that I should have deep cleaning and fluoride treatments.

How could my previous dental office not have mentioned any of that? I started to read about the state of modern dentistry and learned that differences in recommendations from one dentist to another had become a controversial topic. My former dentist hadn’t been negligent or incompetent, just conservative.

Pediatric dentist Jeffrey Camm wrote an op-ed about “creative diagnosis” — pushing unnecessary treatments — in ADA News, the official publication of the American Dental Association. A Mother Jones article attributed the “upselling” trend to dentists’ rising student debt and decreasing earnings because people have fewer cavities today. The cost of upselling usually comes out of patients’ pockets. Although more common that it used to be, dental insurance generally covers only routine cleanings and X-rays.

I left the aggressive practice for a dentist who proved to have a restrained approach. Joani Tarsitano didn’t mention night guards, precavities, or deep cleaning and fluoride treatments. She didn’t push any procedures. Once I asked her about teeth whitening and she answered, “If your teeth are healthy, what’s wrong with their yellowing as you age? That’s normal.” Wow, I thought. How many dentists would forgo a chance to make money on teeth whitening?

A letter announcing Dr. Tarsitano’s retirement arrived this summer. I called around to dental practices to ask whether the dentist tends to be proactive or wait-and-see. The answers tended to be variations of “We will always give you a cost estimate before doing anything.” Not much to go on.

So, I chose my next dental office based on distance. The dentist will be on probation. If I’m told I need procedures that Dr. Tarsitano never mentioned, I’ll look around again. It’s important to me to establish a strong relationship with a doctor for my old age. Rapport with a dentist is not as important — except for the rapport involved in agreeing about treatment.

Southern Illinois QB Nic Baker was named the Missouri Valley Football Conference Co-Offensive Player of the Week Sunday. (Photo by SIUSalukis.com)

Despite a convincing 26-point victory to start the season against regional rival Southeast Missouri, the Southern Illinois football team took a slight step backward Monday in the STATS Perform FCS Top 25 poll.

The Salukis fell one spot to No. 8 and were leapfrogged by new No. 4 Montana and No. 7 Eastern Washington.

Montana pulled off a 13-7 win in Seattle against Pac-12 Conference member Washington Saturday, while Eastern Washington scored a 35-33 double-overtime victory against UNLV, a member of the FBS Mountain West Conference.

SIU quarterback Nic Baker, who was making his fourth career start, was named the Missouri Valley Football Conference Co-Offensive Player of the Week Sunday night.

The Rochester High School graduate threw for a school-record 460 yards and four touchdowns in a 47-21 win against SEMO. He completed 25 of 34 passes to improve to 4-0 as a starter in his career for the Salukis (1-0).

Defending champion Sam Houston ranks No. 1 in this week’s poll, and is followed by South Dakota State, James Madison, Montana, North Dakota State, Delaware and Eastern Washington.

After SIU at No. 8, the top 10 includes North Dakota at No. 9 and Weber State, which fell from sixth, at No. 10.

SIU travels to Kansas State, a member of the FBS’ Big 12 Conference for a 6 p.m. game Sept. 11.

Outside the FCS Top 25, Illinois State (1-0) is the 11th team listed in others receiving votes. The Redbirds earned 10 points in the poll and is among 14 teams listed on two or more ballots.

Illinois State also faces an FBS opponent Sept. 11 with a trip to Western Michigan of the Mid-American Conference. Kickoff is scheduled for 4 p.m.

Western Illinois (0-1) travels to No. 4 Montana for a 7 p.m. kickoff Sept. 11.

According to Worldometer, the life expectancy in Japan is 85 years, Italy is 84 years, France is 83 years, and Greece is 82 years. Life expectancy in the United States is 78 years; however, states have different numbers. For instance, life expectancy in Hawaii is 82 years and in West Virginia it is 74 years. Cities also vary. I was surprised to see that Chicago has a life expectancy of 79 years.

There are several things that determine life expectancy including health, lifestyle, and environment. There are no guarantees; however, we can do our best to live a healthy life. Most of us know the basics for living healthy which include eating a healthy diet, exercising, getting our rest, not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, reducing stress, etc.

We could also look at healthy habits in other countries and incorporate them in our lives. For example, in Japan they eat small portions loaded with vegetables. In Greece people consume fruits, veggies, grains, and legumes with a minimal amount of meat and dairy. In India they like to add spices like turmeric and ginger to their food. Different types of spices provide natural health benefits and give food more flavor. In Italy they consume plant foods and olive oil. They also drink wine in moderation which can be considered healthy.

In the Netherlands they ride their bikes for transportation. In Thailand they get regular massages. In Iceland they love to swim. In China they practice Tai Chi which helps with stress and improves muscle strength and flexibility. The workday in Sweden averages six hours.

Countries with the lowest overall obesity rates include Japan (3 percent), Korea (4 percent), Switzerland (8 percent), Italy, Norway, and Sweden (10 percent). The obesity rate in the United States is 42% for adults. Notice that countries with the lowest obesity rate also have the highest life expectancy.

Do not place yourself in a box when it comes to living healthy. Be willing to try different things. If implementing healthy habits from other countries works for you, do it.

BY SANDRA GUY

What better time to enjoy healthy Halloween treats as COVID and the Delta variant call like terrifying wolves to ease up on vigilance?

So here are a few examples — with no soy, nuts or gluten — which you can use as a jumping-off point for your own fun creations.  

Green apples with googly eyes

Just green apples, sunflower butter, sunflower seeds, a strawberry tongue, and a batch of homemade googly eyes.

The secret to the eyes:

1 c. powdered sugar

1 tsp. cornstarch

1 Tbsp. corn syrup

2 tsp. nondairy milk

1/4 tsp. almond extract (or vanilla extract)

mini non-dairy chocolate chips (like Enjoy Life)

Whisk together the powdered sugar and cornstarch. Add the rest of the ingredients except for the chocolate chips and mix until combined. It should be a thick paste at this point.

Place into either a piping bag or Ziploc baggie and pipe dots into one row onto a baking sheet lined with wax paper. Gently top each dot with the mini chocolate chip–you don’t want to wait too long to place the chocolate chip in the middle or it will set.

Repeat until all the paste is gone.

Allow the googly eyes to set for at least 24 hours on your counter.

Halloween Ghost Fruit Kabobs

You Will Need:

Marshmallows

Fruit of your choice

12-inch wooden skewers

Black food coloring markers with a fine tip

For the marshmallows, use the marker to draw a ghostly face onto each marshmallow — or a friendly or goofy face, depending on the children’s ages.

Let the marshmallows dry for a few minutes before using.

Wash and cut the fruit into bite-sized pieces. Add the fruit and then a ghost marshmallow in a pattern to the skewer, and continue with the pattern.

Remember, as tough as it may be to take the time to focus on a healthy diet, it can have a profound effect on a child’s emotional well-being as well as keeping the immune system healthy.

This week’s City of Chicago edition of Public Affairs airs throughout the City:

Tonight at 8:30 pm and midnight, Cable Ch 21 (CAN TV)Tmw night at 9 pm, Cable Ch. 21 (CAN TV)

You can also Watch the Berkowitz and Martin discussion by clicking here.

The show also airs in:

Aurora at 6 pm, Cable Ch 10 this Wednesday & SaturdayRockford at 8:30 pm, Cable Ch. 17 this Thursday

The last time I heard Sandra Cisneros, she spoke, even she recognizes, from a place of anger.  In her defense of American Dirt–a book she blurbed as “the great novel of las Americas”–she responded to questions in a Latino USA interview with syllables tough as the footwork in a zapateado from Veracruz. Often, the interviewer wouldn’t finish the question before Cisneros stepped in off beat, stomping her defense of a novel viewed as inauthentic by many writers and readers in Latino communities. 

Fans criticized her for saying the solution to being disappointed in American Dirt’s prominence was to “do some introspection about where it has caused you to be upset, and then I recommend you write poetry.”

But last month, when I spoke with Sandra Cisneros over Zoom, there was no anger in her voice. In fact, we laughed–a lot. In this conversation, I didn’t hear Cisneros’s words pounding out a heavy argument like a jarocha dancer’s footwork.  Instead, I heard the lightness of a warm and wise voice.  I heard syllables that hummed with the peace of guitar strings plucked one by one.  

I’ve followed her writing from my college days at DePaul in the early 90s, and I think I’ve read just about everything she’s written.  Cisneros says her latest book, Martita, I Remember You, is her best work.  I agree.

Cisneros spoke with me from her home in San Miguel de Allende and made me feel at home as she spoke about her “long view” of life as someone “a estas alturas” at sixty-six. 

Talking about the American Dirt “borlote” as she describes it, Cisneros humbly says, “I do apologize if I was angry. I should not have spoken when I was angry.”

In her latest book, this type of introspection fuels Corina, a probably forty-something Latina, to make sense of where she wanted her life to go and where it is on one Saturday morning in her Chicago home.

While her husband and daughters visit the library, Corina finds an old letter from Martita, an Argentine friend she knew in Paris years ago that asks, “How many days did we know each other?” Corina spends the rest of that morning reading letters, drinking her coffee, remembering life in Paris when she wanted to be a writer and realizes, “We were waiting for something to happen.  Isn’t that what all women do until they learn not to? We were waiting for life to sweep us up in its arms–a Strauss waltz, a room at Versailles, flooded with chandeliers.”

The character faces memories that “bubble up from I don’t know where inside me” as she works alone to remove the “the hundred and six years of varnish like layers of a honey-drenched phyllo” from a dining-room hutch so many Chicagoans recognize.  

Cisneros is clear: this is not a sad story.  “I see it as an awakening,” she explains.

It’s an old story.  Originally, Cisneros intended the short story for inclusion in Woman Hollering Creek, her 1991 book of stories about Latinas young and older in Chicago and the Southwest, published when Cisneros was in her mid-thirties.  The story didn’t fit thematically.  The ending set at a Tango party wasn’t enough in that early version, her editor told her. “The story needed the long view,” Cisneros realizes.   “I couldn’t write of the long view of a life lived, of loves lost, of friendships lost and what those friendships mean, how they throb, how there’s no words, or how they glow like meteorites with all the years,” Cisneros explains with a peace in her voice.  “I’m really happy I was able to rescue it from it’s Sleeping Beauty spell.”

During revisions over the past five years, Cisneros wanted to make a novel out of this story.  But the more she tried expanding it, “the more resistant it became.  It wanted to be something small,” Cisneros accepts.  “Then I realized: it’s a sandwich.  It’s got the Paris part, the Chicago part,  and the letters as the middle part of the two breads.”  She hears people talking about Martita, I Remember You as a novella.  “I always cross-pollinate genres. So I don’t call it anything except prose,” Cisneros says.

But why set the opening of the story in Chicago?  Chicago, after all, Cisneros has recognized in many interviews does not hold good memories for her.  

“I don’t think I would have gotten the success if I stayed in Chicago. Who knows?” she reflects.  “I just couldn’t survive on the salary and being a single woman in neighborhoods where I didn’t feel safe.  The infrastructure of the city for a single woman who’s not living with a husband, children, or father, mother, and six brothers was very hard for me,” Cisneros explains.

But Cisneros recognizes how Chicago launched her writing career with grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Arts Council, and displays of her poetry on CTA buses.

And now, she humorously tells stories with a “long view” of driving throughout Chicago in crummy cars.  One winter, she remembers how her “car did a full pirouette on Lakeshore Drive and all the traffic parted like a ballet number.”  Thankfully, the pirouette ended with her facing in the direction she needed to go in or “I wouldn’t be alive!”  Another time, she looked in her rearview mirror, “And I see my Volkwagen’s engine on fire!”  Firefighters showed up to put the fire out.

“Chicago means different things to me now,” Cisneros explains.  “I really enjoy coming in.”

For Martita, I Remember You, Cisneros tapped into the estrangement she felt as a young artist from Chicago on her first European trip alone after writing The House on Mango Street.  Corina’s neighborhood is around North Avenue and Pulaski, near West Humboldt Park, the last address Cisneros had with parents where she remembers “the despair and dinginess of everyday life.”

When Cisneros arrived in Paris in her late twenties, she realized, “This isn’t the Paris of my sueños!”  Cisneros expected to see the Paris captured in the early 1900s by photographer Eugène Atget.  Instead, she found McDonald’s.  

“The family thinks you are living this glamorous life in Paris,” Cisneros recalls.  “I’m just standing on the corner eating french fries in the cold like some little ragamuffin in a Charles Dickens story.” 

One of her brothers recorded a cassette of Gato Barbieri music, which Cisneros listened to often as she walked around Paris.  Those saxophone melodies for Cisneros were “sex and beauty and writing and sacrifice. He meant everything.”

But then the album ended and her brother needed to fill in a couple of minutes on the cassette.  So he added something he thought his sister would like.  As Cisneros walked through Paris entranced by the architecture and the richness of the tenor sax, she suddenly heard, “She’s a Superfreak! Superfreak!” She laughs.

The Rick James classic broke her bubble. “Paris was the Super Freak music, like a whipped cream pie thrown in my face!”  

And then when she returned home with all these stories about Paris she wanted to share with her family, “No one wants to hear!” Cisneros jokes.  So she decided to put the stories into Martitia, I Remember You.

“I liked things like a chocolate eclair and writing paper,” Cisneros fondly remembers.  “But the experience of being in Paris every time I go has been very painful.  And the people who took me in were the immigrants, the Moroccans, the Algerians,  and in this case in Corina’s story,  the au pairs from Argentina,” Cisneros adds.

“Every immigrant will tell you: when you go to a new country and have no money,  who gives you something? People who have nothing–because they know what it is to have nothing,” she stresses.  Cisneros says this woke her up to her father’s experience of immigrating to the United States.  “Without realizing it, I guess,” Cisneros reflects, “I’ve written an immigrant’s story.”

Cisneros interwove memories of Corina’s father–who is also an upholsterer like Cisneros’s father was–because she asked herself, “What do I know that other Chicana writers don’t know? I do know the tapicería world.”  Cisneros recalls the relevance of her father’s life and how he defined for her “the good father, the good male, the hombre obligado who takes care of his family, a loving father.”  Cisneros goes on to say, “Even now that he is spirit, he’s always been a great strength in my memory and my life and my everyday moments.”

Many of the memories in Martita, I Remember You come through in lists, a technique Cisneros says she probably picked up from some great writer she admires but does not remember.

Corina recalls many times in lists: “Sometimes when I look at trees in winter, how their bare branches give off a violet light.  Or the scent of a baguette.  Or the Moroccan design on an antique doorknob.  Or how a window opens out instead of up, they remind me of those days I lived beside you, Martita.”

Cisneros remembers writing in lists when her father was dying and she was so grief stricken, she could not write poetry or fiction.  She arrived at her parents’ home to find that her mother used her old girl’s room as a storage room.  She began to document everything there.

“A lot of my friends were folk-art sellers or artists, and artists live with, you know,” Cisneros says self-mockingly as she points to the wall behind her, “a whole collection of Mexican plates or a Christmas tree all year.  They live in odd ways.  I’m in love with the space that artists live in because they invent a new way of living.”  

So Cisneros began to make lists when she visited homes.  “I would say, ‘What is that plate?’ ‘Oh, that’s talavera from Puebla.’  That’s how it got started–to create a reality.”

It’s similar for metaphors when Cisneros writes.  “I’m always sketching.  You know how you’d see Picasso always sketching? I’m always sketching with language–all the time since childhood,” Cisneros explains.

“That man looks like a bear dancing backwards.  Or I would just come up with these things not because I was trying to sketch but that’s just how I see the world.  I remember going to Acapulco as a child and feeling sand under my feet and thinking, ‘That feels like the roof of my mouth’ and making those connections with the body.”

So the women in Paris in Cisneros’s novella live “over a coffeehouse in a building as narrow as a book.”  

One thing missing from Martita, I Remember You is explicit, well-developed mentions of politics and global events in a story set with immigrants in an international city.

“I tried, but then it seemed forced,” Cisneros says.  “I thought, ‘Why would Marta be there?’” The novella does include references to the Argentine economy and a mother’s fear that her daughter would get abducted.  But, Cisneros explains, “When you’re that age, the politics are happening in the background.  You’re very self-centered when you’re a young person.”

So will teen readers find something they can connect with or learn from in this story of a probably forty-something-year-old woman making sense of her past and present?

“I think teenagers will recognize themselves in Corina’s fear and her ignorance and her innocence. Corina doesn’t know what to say and so she doesn’t say anything,” Cisneros offers.  “I think they will recognize her wish for something to happen in her life because when we’re young, we go to every single thing that we can because we’re waiting for something to happen.  Then when you get older, you realize: NOTHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN!  STAY HOME!” Cisneros laughs as if she’s laughing with herself at the way she once thought.

Moments of self-reflection guided Cisneros to her next project, out next year: a collection of essays titled, Exploding Cigars and North Stars.  The idea for this collection comes from wisdom gained from being at a point in her life she mentions often: “a estas alturas.”  

“There are people who come into our lives who are exploding cigars. And at the time that is very painful. But when you get to estas alturas, you realize, ‘That took me to a place that I wouldn’t have gone to, and it helped make me who I am now.’ So I bow with gratitude to all exploding cigars.”  And she mentions the north stars who guide us in our life.  “And then,” Cisneros adds, “there are people who are exploding cigars and north stars!”

One of the essays in this collection will comment on the “borlote” she experienced with American Dirt.

“People don’t realize that I blurbed over twenty-five books that year.  When you blurb a book, you don’t know how much money it’s going to earn.  I didn’t make the deal, nor did any of us who blurbed it.  We didn’t know the contract.”

Looking back, Cisneros realizes everyone speaking up during that “borlote” was speaking from a wound.  “I should have spoken from a place of calmness, so that’s my fault.”  

For Cisneros, the wound was being bullied by other writers in the past.  “I will not stand by anyone bullying any other writer. As an activist, as a human rights person, how can we complain about how human beings are being treated at the border and treat another human being in a disparaging manner?”

“Essentially,” Cisneros explains,  “we’re all trying to bring consciousness about the issues of the border.  So why are we fighting amongst each other?  For me, that was the error–that clarity was not brought to the issue the way that it was presented.”

Now that Martita, I Remember You is out this week in audiobook as well–with Cisneros reading the English and Spanish versions with French and Argentine accents where the text needs it–she continues her work on House on Mango Street the opera and a TV series for that book, which she’s writing the pilot for.  Sadly, she says, Esperanza’s situation still exists in Chicago.

She has plans to visit Chicago the Tuesday before Thanksgiving for an event hosted by the National Mexican Museum of Art at the Field Museum, but she doesn’t know how Covid-19 will affect those plans.  

On these trips home, Cisnero works to separate Sandra the writer, who is usually exhausted when she arrives from a book tour, and Sandra the relative who likes to see her family in smaller groups before they all meet up for a dim sum breakfast. 

“Now I know how to make it work,” Cisneros explains.  “No fighting–or you pay the  bill!”  She jokes.  “That works in my family.”

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