Chicago’s mayor shut down the lakefront and I wonder if Evanston will follow, intensifying the sense of confinement: walking there each day has been a solace, earbuds in, working my way through Beethoven’s string quartets one by one: today if given the chance I’ll listen to Quartet in E flat major, Opus 74, “Of the harps.” My wife works the harp of intimate ties on phone and Facetime; our daughter sings Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” encountered as danse macabre on her Nintendo Switch. Fog today. Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.