There is nothing bustling about this newsroom, and I could use a little energy as I write a column from my desk for the first time in two years. Burt Constable | Staff Photographer

Nothing has changed in my cubicle, not even the calendar, since I last wrote a column from this desk in the newsroom two years ago. Burt Constable | Staff Photographer

This photo of my old column buddy Jack Mabley lets him express my feelings about writing a column in an empty newsroom. Burt Constable | Staff Photographer

The moment frozen in time reminds me of visiting crime scenes as a cop reporter in the 1980s. The only things missing are the yellow crime scene tape and my body under a tarp next to my desk. Everything else about my cubicle in the Daily Herald newsroom is the same as it was on March 10, 2020.

On that day, I was getting ready to interview a mom and her son taking the same class at College of DuPage, and COVID-19 was getting ready to change the world we knew. We both followed through on our plans, although the coronavirus certainly had more of an impact than my column.

That was the last time I interviewed someone without wearing a mask. Our nation, our state, our counties, our towns, our businesses and our schools are apparently done with the pandemic and forging ahead. But I'm finding this far more complicated than just hitting the reset button on life.

I climb the three flights of stairs and pause at the newsroom door. The chip in my ID card still works, but I can't remember the code I punch in to open the door. Thankfully, I did that process so many times in my career that muscle memory takes over. My hand punches in four numbers, and the door unlocks.

The first two cubicles to greet me, once bustling with energy, are empty. Deputy Managing Editor Pete Nenni retired in September 2021. Senior Deputy Managing Editor Diane Dungey retired two months later. Not only were they thoughtful and careful editors of my columns, but they also were fun people with whom to start a workday.

The last time I saw them was at farewell parties in their honor in a restaurant's outside seating area, where I got to mingle with reporters and other people I've worked with for years, and in some cases decades, and haven't seen since.

Newsrooms, and reporters, have changed a great deal since my old column buddy, Jack Mabley, could tell stories about being the only sober person in the newsroom some afternoons. Sitting at my desk in an empty newsroom that is as quiet as a morgue, I wouldn't mind a drunk comrade or two for inspiration or, at least, to distract me from my own thoughts.

Landline desk phones, the ringing of which were the dominant sound in newsrooms once the clicketyclack of typewriters disappeared, are gone now. The only sound I hear is an annoying high-pitched buzz, which I want to think is coming from the fluorescent light fixture above my desk but probably is just the ringing of tinnitus in my ears.

To break the monotony, I mosey over to our empty lunchroom, where the vending machine is empty, the microwaves are unused, and the Ping-Pong table mocks me. A small newsroom table where reporters would sometimes lay out documents or photographs is bare, except for a giant, barely used bottle of Germ-X hand sanitizer and a canister of Lysol disinfecting wipes.

Working until after midnight in the old Daily Herald newsroom where I started, now a vacant lot in downtown Arlington Heights, I used to grab a vile cup of vending machine coffee near the end of my shift. When the presses in the basement roared to life, ripples from the vibration would spread across the black surface in my paper cup. That energy was invigorating.

It's hard to extract energy from an empty newsroom. On my desk is a photo, one of my favorites, of Jack Mabley with his head in his hands as if he's trying to come to grips with how we got in this situation. Clipped to it is a note he wrote me when our desks were next to each other and he had big news but didn't want to interrupt me because I was on the phone. "I also won all my serves Saturday," wrote Jack, who always found something joyful about playing tennis in his 80s. He even drew a tiny tennis racket on the note.

My desk is cluttered with photos of my wife and kids, a button from the second annual AIDS Walk in 1991, a Glenn Beckert rookie card, NRA membership cards readers bought in my name over the years, the business card of a DuPage County psychic who would have called me when I plopped it on my desk decades ago if psychics were real, books that I don't need, a Sammy Sosa bobblehead banished to a corner, an autographed copy of a Bible, a paperweight from my mom reminding me that "The ultimate inspiration is the deadline," and a Post-it Note reading: "1. Come up with a column idea 2. Write it 3. Repeat."

Which reminds me that I need to put this aside and write a column.