Jesus, my lifelong friend, accompanied me through chicken pox, mumps, and measles when quarantine isolated me from my sisters, parents, and friends. No, I didn’t have Mother Theresa-like visions. He was more of an imaginary friend for my waxing brain, like an animated Pooh Bear. Clergy at St. Mary’s school in Terre Haute, Indiana, taught that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem. Due to those back-to-back pre-vaccine childhood illnesses, I heard these Jesus facts my second time around in the first grade. The teaching doubled down in my malleable brain, which had grown to ninety-five percent of its total capacity, normal for a six-year-old.
There was never any question that Jesus was born of Jewish parents. Israel, presented as a holy place, not a political state, was sacred ground because that’s where Jesus lived. There was always the implication that we, as Catholics, were in Jesus’s family, that somehow we had Jewish roots. If Jews believed in Jesus, they got to go to heaven, like us Catholics. But no other religion. Such was my Roman Catholic schooling.
Our single black-and-white family television transmitted few programs into our living room in the 1950s. Roy Rogers and I Love Lucy were allowed, but my parents insisted we watch the nightly news. My sisters and I didn’t dare whine for fear of verbal reprisals like, “Shut up and listen—maybe you’ll learn something.”
They’d let us watch “This is Your Life,” a forerunner to PBS’ “Finding Your Roots’. In 1953, This is Your Life broadcasted the story of 32-year-old Hanna Bloch-Kohner, a Holocaust survivor. I wasn’t much interested in the not-so-famous Hanna, but I did wonder about the Holocaust.
When I was ten years old, as my brain power peaked, local TV stations advertised the opening of Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie, Illinois. We lived in Wilmette, on the border of Skokie.
“Where’s Skokie?” I asked my mother.
“That’s where all the Jews live.” She answered.
All my thoughts screeched to a halt. I’d never seen a Jew. I assumed that whatever Jews were leftover from the time of Jesus surely had died in that mysterious “Holocaust,” a word adults uttered in a hush. Of course, I couldn’t ask my mother what Jews were doing in Skokie. She expected me to know what she knew, no matter the subject. She would have ridiculed me with a sarcastic, “You’re kidding me. Don’t you watch the news?”
From that moment on, I looked for Jews in supermarkets, at the beach, in the record store, and even at school. It’s possible I looked for men who resembled Jesus. In high school, I met a Jewish brother and sister. I stared them into my spiritual family. I wondered how they got to New Jersey from Bethlehem or Jerusalem or Israel, those holy places whose ancient remnants had settled in my bones, with Jesus.
My brain, now waning, has reformed itself through evidence, facts, and logic into knowing and loving the Jewish story. There may be evidence, and there may be facts, but there’s no logic to knowing Jesus.
Early in my sobriety, a therapist told me to volunteer in order to get out of my depression. I almost went for her throat.
“That’s your advice? How can I help anyone when I can hardly get out of bed?”
In Alcoholics Anonymous, we’re told self-centeredness is a common trait that leads to drunkenness; it’s suggested that serving others will help keep us sober.
“It’s a spiritual principle. Don’t overthink it. Just go help someone.” An AA meeting-goer told me when I was whining about the blues one January.
After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress, and Coretta Scott King, President Ronald Reagan finally signed a bill creating a federal holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Observed on the third Monday of January, dear Martin was first celebrated in 1986.
“You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” MLK told us.
Grace is an indulgent gift from the cosmos. A heart full of love sounds too godly for my rebellious nature. For some, it comes naturally. Not for me. I meet many people I don’t want to love or serve. I balk. This is why I must be told to commit to love, commit to serve. Every day, I’m reminded of the promised rewards: freedom from melancholy and self-pity. The promise is appealing—and attainable.
During the month of January, organizations, politicians, GenXers, and citizen elders all celebrate MLK through service to others. Rush University Medical Center in Chicago offers a few easy opportunities.
Celebrate at a hybrid event: “A Lesson from Dr. King: Health Equity is Everyone’s Business,” on Wednesday, January 17, from 1:00 -2:00 pm. Experts share how to work towards ensuring everyone has access to their highest level of health. Click here if you’d like more information.
Volunteer in person in Chicagodistributing 300 meals on Friday, January 19, from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm. Multiple volunteer roles are available (preparers, packers, and drivers). Want to help? Click here for more info.
Mentor with the Community Health Mentor Program. Teach first-year graduate students about living with chronic conditions (high blood pressure, diabetes, alcoholism), as well as guide them in becoming patient-centered practitioners. All Community Health Mentor meetings will be on Zoom. Mentors receive up to sixty dollars in gift cards for participating in the training and all three meetings. The meeting dates are Wednesdays, January 24, February 14, and March 20, between 1 pm -6 pm for 60-90 minutes. Click here for more info or email Hannah Weitzman, Program Coordinator, at hannah_weitzman@rush.edu.
Dispelling my preoccupation with self is a lifelong endeavor. It’s comforting that MLK recognized this is true for many, which is why he gave us all the big quote:
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?”
The first movie I saw on Christmas Day was To Kill A Mockingbird in 1962. Since I suffered from an endless holiday hangover, little of the story stuck in my saturated brain. As a high school freshman, when I was still afraid to fail, I’d read and reported on To Kill A Mockingbird. Until Mockingbird, I hadn’t seen a movie created from a book I’d read. Fortunately, the film is still so popular it’s come and gone enough times on TV for me to watch it again. And again.
A Christmas Day movie-going tradition began, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. At first December 25th movie releases offered an escape from uncomfortable family time. Before I got sober in 1976, mandatory holiday gatherings handed out one big gift-wrapped box of shame. Movie people count on family escapees, I suppose. Some of the best movies have been released on Christmas Day: The Sting, Catch Me If You Can, Broadcast News, Sherlock Holmes, and Tombstone.
Every Sunday when my son was a toddler, he’d nap as his father studied, and I’d go to the movies. When he was old enough, we went to the movies together, especially on Christmas Day after the divorces, when it was just the two of us. When he was seventeen, he convinced me to see Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film, “Stop Making Sense.”
“I don’t like punk rock,” I said.
“It’s not punk. It’s different. You’ll like it,” he convinced me.
He had his own band at the time and knew his music, so I trusted him. He was right. I blasted the “Stop Making Sense” cassette on my car radio until the tape wore thin.
When movie buddy Marca Bristo was alive and in town, we couldn’t wait to get to the first showing of the Christmas Day releases before she returned home to her family dinner. We’d usually discuss the movie over after-theater coffee, but on Christmas Day, coffee shops closed, so we’d sit in the quiet theater afterward, mulling the pros and cons. Marca died in September 2019. The Christmas releases that year included Little Women, 1917, and It’s a Beautiful Day in theNeighborhood. I chose Just Mercy, which tells the true story of defense attorney Bryan Stevenson and his client, a black man falsely accused of murder. A powerful advocate for people with disabilities, Marca would have chosen the same.
Movie theaters closed for a while at the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020. I’m so wary of catching Covid and all manner of infectious diseases that I’ve not been in a movie theater since Christmas 2019. It’s tempting to see the re-make of The Color Purple, which will open this year on December 25. But every time I’m in a coffee shop or at a public event and someone sneezes or blows their nose, low-level panic attacks. Reclining in a multi-plex next to strangers for two or three hours’ worth of entertainment is out of the question.
Alex Lubischer, a playwriting teacher at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, taught my beginning playwriting class that every play has its own interior logic that doesn’t have to be bound to reality. I’ve seen plenty of those, good and bad. He prompted us to write a short “bad” play that included a fire escape, a talking animal, a fur coat and a Venmo payment. I can’t guarantee my bad play, The Condo Board, has any interior logic, but it is definitely not bound to reality. The characters and their dialogs are fictional. However, you may see a similarity or two if you’ve ever been to a condo board meeting.
The Condo Board
SET: COURTYARD—48 UNIT FOUR-STORY BRICK BUILDING-EVENING
WE OPEN in a three-sided courtyard. It’s the end of summer. Onlookers sit in their open windows around the courtyard, on the lumpy grass, or lean against the building, waiting for the condo board meeting to start. In a 4th-floor window, a well-dressed, emaciated man with a straw fedora is stretched out on the windowsill. He’s drinking from a whiskey bottle and smoking.
Board members sit in a circle of mismatched folding chairs. Fire escapes are fixed to all three walls. Potted red geraniums fill the 3rd-floor landing of one. A bicycle is locked to the 2nd-floor railing of another. An old rag rug lays over the 4th-floor railing of another. In the center of the building, a cement sidewalk leads from the back door to the grassy courtyard’s edge.
(PAUL, 49, the Condo Board President, balances a spiral notebook and some loose papers on his lap. The sleeves of his white dress shirt are rolled up. He’s wearing khakis and fancy sneakers and holding a pen.)
PAUL. The meeting will come to order. Do we have a quorum?
(BIANCA, 35, building manager, sits next to PAULwith a clipboard stuffed with papers. She’s slight and perky, long dark ponytail, wearing an ill-fitting grey suit.)
BIANCA. No.
(NORA, 50, board member, sitting next to BIANCA. Blonde bob, 1950s flowered fitted dress, pearls, shiny barrette, round wire-rim eyeglasses, white socks, classic white Keds.)
NORA. I talked to Barry an hour ago. He said he’s coming. He agrees to paint the meeting room aqua.
(BARRY, 45, board member, paraclimbs down the fire escape from the 4th floor like a chimpanzee, stopping to do chin-ups on the metal bars. Fit, athletic, Margaritaville T-shirt, shorts, black sneakers.)
BARRY. I’m coming! I’m coming!
PAUL. (Strains his neck to see BARRY.)
What are you doing on the fire escape?
BARRY. (Lands on the ground and walks to a chair next to NORA. NORA perks up.)
Since we’re meeting in the courtyard, I thought I’d get a workout on my way down. It’s faster than that rickety old elevator.
NORA. (Shouts at no one in particular.)
When will the meeting room be finished? It’s gonna be too cold out here next month. Can we paint it aqua?
PAUL. (Looks at BIANCA.)
Do we have a quorum?
BIANCA. Yes.
PAUL. Did everyone read the minutes from the last meeting?
(The emaciated man, hugging his bottle, falls out of his 4th-floor window into the bushes below. His hat flies off in the direction of the meeting. No one notices.)
BARRY. My name is spelled wrong.
(SUSAN, 55, board member, next to BARRY, bleach blonde straightened long hair, fake diamond ring, tight white t-shirt, blue jean jacket, tie-dyed tights, ankle bracelet, oversized pink sneakers.)
SUSAN. I didn’t get the minutes.
BIANCA. Minutes are in everyone’s board pack.
SUSAN. Not mine.
PAUL. Do we have a motion to approve the minutes with the correction of BARRY’s name?
(CARMEN, 45, board member, next to PAUL, black unruly hair, thick eye makeup, red lips, hoop earrings, head scarf, bangle bracelets, ruffle blouse, stuffed into blue jeans.)
CARMEN. (Signals a silent thumbs-up motion)
PAUL. All in favor?
SUSAN. Don’t we need a second?
PAUL. What?
SUSAN. A second, someone to second the motion.
PAUL. How about you?
SUSAN. (Shaking her head)
Oh no, I’m not gonna have my name in no minutes.
(MARCO, 33, board member next to Carmen, tall, black slicked back hair, goatee, sleeveless t-shirt, tattoos, tight jeans, pointed tie shoes, aviator sunglasses.)
MARCO. I second.
PAUL. All in favor?
NORA. When will the meeting room be finished? Does everyone like aqua?
PAUL. Can we have the Treasurer’s report?
BIANCA. The Treasurer isn’t here.
PAUL. That’s Mark. Did he sell his unit?
(Pause. No one answers.)
BIANCA. Tsk. I’ll do the Treasurer’s Report. We have 239,241 dollars in operating.
PAUL. Motion to approve the Treasurer’s Report?
BARRY. I move to approve the Treasurer’s Report.
PAUL. (Gives Susan the evil eye.)
All in favor?
ALL. Ay
MARCO. I’ll volunteer to take over the Treasurer spot.
PAUL. Ok. Let’s table that ’til next meeting.
NORA. Wait. Hear that? Someone’s playing rap music. I hate rap music. When will the aqua board room be painted?
CARMEN. I’ll be right back.
(she stands and walks off, shouting over her shoulder).
I have to get my fur coat. It’s too cold out here. (voice fades)
(BOARD members talk all at the same time about nothing in particular)
PAUL. Order, please. BIANCA, let’s have the Manager’s Report.
NORA. (curled over, swinging her legs, muttering toward the audience)
Finally. The meeting room.
(GREG 35, board member, next to MARCO, sandy hair, Rolling Stones t-shirt, blue jeans, Converse sneakers, skateboard at his feet)
GREG. Carmen! Carmen! Your parrot got out!
BARRY. I’ll get him.
(BARRY paraclimbs up and around the fire escapes, trying to capture the PARROT.)
(PARROT, played by a child, green & red feathered costume, yellow beaked mask, hooked up to circus wires from the ceiling, flies up and perches on a fire escape railing.)
PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
BARRY. (mutters toward PARROT.)
Yeah, we’re writing you out of the building, Buddy.
(Various Board members and onlookers simultaneously try to catch the PARROT and shoo him back into CARMEN’s open window. The PARROT flies around squawking and settles on CARMEN’s window ledge.)
PAUL. Order! Leave the PARROT. BIANCA! Please. The Manager’s Report? Order everyone!
(BARRY swings back down from the fire escape and returns to his seat.)
BIANCA. First up, Owners are complaining about the PARROT squawking.
CARMEN. (arriving back in the courtyard with her fake fur coat) Aw, C’mon. He’s not that loud.
(She blows a kiss up at the PARROT.)
Are you sweet boy?
PARROT. (PARROT bounces onto the fire escape.)
Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
SUSAN. I move we prohibit parrots from living in the building.
(PARROT flies around squawking and dive-bombing members of the board.)
PAUL. Is there a second?
SUSAN. Now you ask for a second?
PAUL. Do I hear a second?
CARMEN. My PARROT is an Emotional Support Animal protected by the government.
(To the PARROT)
C’mere baby.
(PARROT sits on Carmen’s shoulder.)
GREG. Carmen, you must recuse yourself from this discussion as a board member.
CARMEN. Ok, but my PARROT is an Emotional Support Animal.
(BARRY rolls his eyes. Greg and Marco stare at their phones.)
NORA. Can we talk about the meeting room? Painting it aqua? How about teal?
PAUL. (Ignores NORA.)
There’s a motion on the table.
MARCO. What motion?
GREG. (elbows MARCO)
The motion to kick the parrot out of the building.
(Whispers to MARCO)
Did you get the 50k? I Venmoed to you just before the meeting.
NORA. (Crosses her arms and legs, turns away, looks toward the audience)
I thought the motion was to paint the meeting room turquoise. Or was it aqua?
MARCO. (whispers to GREG)
Thanks, man. That new casino already wiped me out.
PAUL. (Looking around at the board members).
Is there a second to the motion about the PARROT?
(No response. Everyone looks around but not at PAUL or each other, then look at their phones)
PAUL. Hearing none, the motion fails.
PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
SUSAN. (Jumps up)
Wait a minute, we didn’t even discuss it!
BARRY. The motion failed. End of. Let’s move on.
(Winks to CARMEN. Talks loud so the whole building can hear.)
This is not going away, sister. We all hate that thing.
CARMEN. That’s not true.
(Looking around the building)
Who hates the PARROT?
ALL. (muttering) Not Me. Not Me.
BARRY. Let’s move on.
PAUL. Next item on the Agenda is recycling. BIANCA?
BIANCA. Okay, everyone wants recycling. We pay a recycling company $12,000 a year to come every Tuesday to pick up, and the blue bin is always empty. I propose we end the contract.
SUSAN. NO! I recycle all the time.
ALL. So do I! So do I!
BIANCA. Well, if everyone is recycling, why is the bin always empty?
BARRY. It’s that homeless guy who lives in the alley. He takes them plastic bottles and sells ‘em.
NORA. (Looking at Barry.) Are we going to paint the meeting room turquoise or what?
(BARRY puts his arm around NORA and whispers in her ear. NORA blushes and looks at her phone.)
PAUL. Is there a motion to end the recycling contract?
GREG. I move to end the contract.
(GREG nudges MARCO)
MARCO. I second.
PAUL. All in favor?
ALL. Ay.
PARROT. Squawk! Squawk! Squawk!
CARMEN. I move we adjourn.
BARRY. (Standing in front of his chair, stretching, and doing squats.)
What did we just vote on?
PAUL. We still have items on the agenda — the cable company upgrade, fixing the front sidewalk, and security cameras.
CARMEN. I still move to adjourn.
BARRY. I second.
(Winks at Carmen)
Let’s go to your place and watch the game.
NORA. (Smiling, Looks up from her phone.)
Did we vote to paint the meeting room yet?
PAUL. All in favor to adjourn?
ALL. Ay. Ay. Ay.
PARROT (On CARMEN’s shoulder as she walks off with BARRY)
Squawk
(NORA walks off, smiling, staring at a fire escape.)
GREG. (Huddles with PAUL and MARCO, looks at PAUL) Let’s go to yours and decide on the rest of these contracts. My brother-in-law has a security company we can use for those cameras.
MARCO. My girlfriend is the bookkeeper at a cement company. I know the boss. They do sidewalks.
BIANCA. (Overhears and walks over)
My dad can get us a deal from Comcast.
PAUL. Ok. Ok. Might as well. We’ll never get anywhere otherwise. (All four walk off together, chattering.)
(Onlookers in the courtyard amble off. Others linger in their windows, some smoking and looking at the sky. Someone waters a geranium and then stares at the sky. The man who fell into the bushes scrambles out of the branches and wobbles over to one of the chairs, hugging his bottle).
(NORA appears in the courtyard wearing a painter’s shirt with a bucket of aqua paint. She picks up the man’s hat and puts it on his head. He nods and takes a swig. She begins painting a fire escape as she hums “Blue Skies.” Onlookers look down at her and blissfully return to staring into the dark blue sky, humming along.)
The morning after my last colonoscopy, I stood in line at Starbucks to satisfy a sudden obsession for a flat white, not my usual coffee drink. A familiar tune came through the surround sound subwoofers. My toes began tapping involuntarily until the song’s words remembered my voice from long, long ago and softly fell freely from my lips.
Thunder only happens when it’s raining
Players only love you when they’re playing.
Dreams. Stevie Nicks. I imagined myself wiggling my hips and flailing my arms—an unwise move for a not-so-sure-footed roly-poly 77-year-old.
Feldenkrais teacher Deborah Darr says, “Imagine you’re doing the movements you can’t physically do.” She taught me that imagination can so deeply engage the mind that the body feels like it’s moving when it’s not. So, on my way home from Starbucks, I imagined myself line-dancing down the street humming Dreams.
By the time I got home, I was physically exhausted. I clicked into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous on Zoom. I’ve been attending AA meetings for over 50 years and often ho-hum to myself, “I’ve heard this story already…nothing new,” even if I’ve never seen the speaker before in my life. On this day, I zeroed in on the story so wholly that I felt every cheap drink, every disgusting hangover, every regrettable hook-up, and every sickening word of his drunken story. When he talked about getting sober, my stomach balled up, remembering the agony of those early days of sobriety with uncontrollable sweaty shakes and tears. The love he felt from fellow sober alcoholics and for his family sticking with him filled me, too. Love and gratitude seeped into my every pore.
The growing ball in my stomach erupted at the emotional and physical powerlessness, and I ran to the bathroom and puked.
(AP Photo/Dor Kedmi)ASSOCIATED PRESS
Seeking distraction, I turned on the TV. Hamas terrorists had tunneled under the Gaza-Israel border a few days before and riddled Jewish babies with bullets. News outlets had taken a few days to get the images to us. I wept watching the photos and videos, hearing children crying out for their mothers, watching helpless fathers, and reporters describing families on the move. Displaced. Terrified. Confused. Grieving.
I reached in my purse for the forgotten mound of papers handed to me as I left the “colonoscopy suite.” Was I supposed to read them sooner? I don’t know. But I saw why I was so giddy, twirly, and happy in the morning and so emotionally flattened later. Fentanyl. The doctor shot fentanyl in my arm before snipping a bit of chitterling from my innards. Fentanyl is so powerful that I forgot biopsy results were coming my way.
The doctor sent me a note within a few days. “All clear,” he wrote.
Just one veinful of fentanyl laid down a new neuro path in my brain, allowing the deepest of joys and sorrows. Since then, if I’m tuned in, boundless joy arises from the hope of alcoholic stories—and bottomless sorrow from images of bloodied children being carried to unsafe safety.
At the Convent of the Sacred Heart in 1958, Mother Cleary announced at the weekly school assembly the name of the annual school play. She was uncharacteristically gleeful.
“Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado will be this year’s play. We’ll start auditions next week. The entire school will take part. It will be a real pageant!”
The “convent” was a community of nuns and a Catholic girls’ school for grades five through twelve in a pastoral Chicago suburb. The nun’s surnames Riley, Doyle, O’Brien, and McCarthy would lead outsiders to think the order of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary has its roots in Ireland. Not so. The order originated in France. Wealthy Irish families paid to have their well-educated daughters live and teach as “Madams” of the Sacred Heart, as they were known colloquially.
On hearing the news of The Mikado, we in the lower grades looked at each other with a shrugged Huh? The high schoolers cheered. Full of musicians, music lovers, budding drama queens, or future dramatists, the upper grades knew their Gilbert & Sullivan.
Gilbert & Sullivan wrote their 1885 comic opera as a satire on Victorian mores, culture, and government. The plot of The Mikado is the operatic old stand-by of an adolescent boy and girl trapped in forbidden love. The forbidden in this opera is a law against flirting. Some like to think Gilbert & Sullivan used the ridiculous plot to mock England’s law against homosexuality.
The late 1880s British society, the Victorian era, is known for its sexual prudishness. As an eighth-grader in the 1950s, I doubt I knew the word “Victorian” was synonymous with hypocritical sexual repression. Do you suppose those crafty Sacred Heart nuns were trying to get some subliminal point across to their mostly virginal students?
Those in the know at school aroused curious excitement about the play, the music, the staging, and the costumes. Oh, the costumes. The Mikado is a fake Japanese story, and the buzz about the songs, the kimonos, the make-up, and those hairdos filled my dreams with whirling color.
In Catholic schools, everyone sings in the choir throughout the year’s many feast days. When it came to my turn to audition, I had high hopes of landing a dramatic singing part. I had no idea I couldn’t carry a tune. My seventh-grade sister and I were called together to audition with Mother Cleary.
“Oh, girls, we have the perfect parts for you! You will be dressed as mackerels and stand as sentries on either side of the stage for the entire play! Isn’t that exciting? You’ll be visible the whole time!”
“Mackerels? You mean fish?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, yes! Don’t worry; you aren’t required to attend all the rehearsals—just the last few. Mother O’Brien will contact you about your costumes.”
“I won’t be singing?”
“Oh no, dear. That isn’t a part for you.”
“Thank you, Mother.” No matter how dispirited I felt, I knew manners were required. Pretending to be grateful was more virtuous than expressing true feelings.
Our costumes were colorful green felt tunics with blue and grey scales stitched in rows around the entire body. A fin and fishtail were sewn to the back, not that it mattered since only the front was visible on stage. I loved my costume. Mother O’Brien fitted it just right. But the fish head? It was a gigantic papier-mâché exaggeration of a mackerel head with slits for us to look out. We had to wiggle into our heads in the wings and be led to our spots at each edge of the stage. The smell of fresh white paste never dissipated inside the mackerel head.
We held silver staffs fastened to oversized cardboard hatchets. The mackerels were also executioners.
As executioner mackerels, we stood sentry throughout the play — a constant reminder to the audience that The Mikado is about death. Self-decapitation, being buried alive, and boiling in oil are all described in The Mikado as humorous ways to die if caught flirting. Death is funny.
I suppose for nuns cloistered in their habits, satire about death allowed them a fun escape from the reality of staring at a bleeding dead man on the cross at daily matins. My thoughts have turned to death every day before and since The Mikado because of that same bleeding dead man on the cross. But the play permitted me to laugh at death, and myself, for that matter.
As for Gilbert & Sullivan, I feel nauseous whenever I hear The Mikado’s “Pretty Little Maidens.” I suffer from a subconscious sixty-five-year-old humiliation that I buried while standing on that stage for hours, holding a weapon meant to decapitate.
George Booth, the New Yorker cartoonist who died in November 2022, once created the funniest cartoon in memory. First of all, Booth’s silly line drawings were and remain funny enough–they don’t need captions. But the one I so love is a man sitting at his typewriter on a dilapidated porch wistfully smoking a pipe. Nine or ten dogs of different sizes and shapes laze around. There’s a bulbless socket hanging from the ceiling. His wife stands in the doorway. Caption: “Write about dogs!”
Ok. Ok. It’s not the funniest cartoon to you. But for me, a dog owner and a writer, it’s hilarious.
Obviously, the cartoon man has shouted, ‘What should I write about?’ ‘Write about dogs’ is a funny way of saying ‘write what you know’, writing’s first principle. Even fiction holds truths. Funny conversations and tales of goofy adventures are all around, like the dogs in Booth’s cartoon. I hesitate to write them because I don’t want my blog-reading friends to know how amusing their lives are to me. And what if the writing isn’t funny?
This summer I attended a free Comedy Writing Workshop taught by a professional, very intuitive, improv comedian. We didn’t have to pretend to be a tree or a bologna sandwich, though that would’ve been a kick; we simply pretended we were at job interviews and went back & forth with questions and answers. We could have answered any old way, and indeed creativity was encouraged, but everyone in this group seemed to answer like their jobs were on the line for real. And they. were not. funny.
Me? I said I was fired from my last job because I attempted to kill my husband with a stapler when he came to the office for a surprise lunch. Funny? I thought so, but no one laughed. Perhaps I actually look or sound like a murderer.
The comedy teacher smartened up to this over-55 group right away. She tailored the two-hour class to the cognition level of the twelve students she had before her. And still, no one was funny.
A friend of mine who’d recently been examined for dementia gave permission to the memory doctor to ask me how my friend had changed. Without hesitation, I answered, “She’s really funny but it’s taking her longer to get the punch line.”
Is this part of it? Aging, I mean.
Most researchers I skimmed agree that age-related cognitive decline contributes to difficulty with “humor comprehension”. The list of symptoms includes:
An inability to understand satire
A childlike sense of humor or enjoyment of slapstick comedy
Laughing at things that are not particularly funny, such as a dog barking
Taking jokes literally
Making inappropriate comments about strangers in public
George Booth created his last New Yorker cartoon ten months before he died from complications of dementia at 96. The cartoon cover is a goofy white dog glancing at a clock. Is that funny? A dog checking the time?
If not, George and I share the same demented symptom of chuckling at things that aren’t particularly funny
On Thursday, March 30, a cousin called to say she’d heard my long-forgotten sister Mara had died. We’ve both heard such rumors over the years and have no way of verifying them. So we shrugged and turned our attention to stories about our grandchildren before saying goodbye. A few minutes later she texted me a post from Mara’s Facebook:
The next morning I sipped coffee with one hand as I clicked into voicemails, emails and texts. A voicemail from the previous day said, ”Yes, ma’am. My name is Frank. I’m a captain with Winchester Police. Uh trying to find some possible information about your sister Mara if you can give me a call back. My telephone number is 540xxxxxx. Thanks.”
Captain Frank said they’d responded to a wellness check nearly three weeks ago, on March 13 and was sorry to say Mara had died. The police couldn’t find any information except an emergency contact on Mara’s health records for one of my other sisters. That number was disconnected.
Their investigation drove them to Facebook looking for clues. Eventually they connected to Ellen, an old high school friend who tried staying in touch with Mara. Years ago I’d given Ellen my phone number during a time when people were still trying to help Mara get sober.
“How did she die?” I asked the Captain.
“The death certificate won’t be available for a few weeks. Nothing suspicious though. No reason for us to ask for an autopsy,” he said.
“Oh. Where’s her body?” I asked.
“At the funeral home. They are concerned about the disposition of the remains.”
The Captain felt he ought to talk to the one quasi-official designated family member whom Mara listed as her emergency contact. I said it might take me a few hours to contact her since I didn’t have her number.
“The landlord hasn’t called us yet,” said the Captain, “but we’ll need to give him a contact.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess it’s obvious we are all estranged.”
I thanked him profusely and told him to feel free to contact me again if need be.
Mara was the oldest of four sisters. I, the second born, became an unwanted character in her life from the dawn of our family story. As adults Mara and I tried here and there to be loving. She once sent me a textbook, England in Literature, from my high school English class. It has my handwritten notes in the margins. She’d salvaged the book from the rubble of our mother’s home. This cherished gift is one of the kindest gestures of my lifetime.
But our ancestral roots of untreated alcoholism proved too tangled for Mara to weed through. I arose as an easy target for her perennial unruly emotions, especially after I joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
From her Facebook page, I see that many of Mara’s old friends loved her dearly and tried to poke through her isolation for years with little success. Ellen’s brief eulogy tells me Mara confided in her, and Ellen loved Mara even in Mara’s brokenness.
That is the most comforting condolence of all—knowing Mara was loved.
Mara Burke, b. February 1, 1945, d. March 13, 2023
Restrictive covenants, redlining and contract buying were some of the discriminatory housing practices used to segregate Chicago in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Restrictive covenants prevented Black Americans, and sometimes Jewish Americans from buying, renting, or living in houses in white neighborhoods.
The Chicago Covenants Project, begun in Spring 2021, uncovers deed restrictions officially recorded in Cook County. A team of their researchers and volunteers gather in the Tracts Division in the basement of city hall a few times a month to search land records for racial covenants.
Finding the Tracts Division of the County Clerk’s Office is the first test of a volunteer’s sleuthing skills. The entrance to the first floor staircase is often obscured by a large easel with a sign listing the prices of birth certificates and marriage licenses—no arrow pointing to “Tracts”. I once worked in the Clerk’s office but I still feel subversive slipping past the sign and the security guard to head downstairs.
The Tracts Division is a football-field sized room organized by rows of old shelves filled with real estate index books. Each book is 2 feet by 4 feet. A Project researcher assigns the books by number. My first assignment was book number 420. I lifted it onto the top of the elbow-high bookshelf and leafed through page by page. Thank God I thought to swallow an allergy pill before I left home.
Every deed recorded in Cook County until 1980 is hand written in an index book. After 1980, the records are digitized. Each page could have deeds recorded from 1910 to 1980. I looked only at deeds recorded up to 1950 since restrictions waned after a 1948 Supreme Court decision declaring racial covenants unconstitutional.
The volunteers in Tracts spread out around the room with their assigned books. Looking for covenants line by line is tedious. There’s a small explosion of joy, “I found one!” when one of us spots a handwritten “rac-restr” notation.
Property ownership has long been the avenue to accumulating family wealth. Restrictive covenants helped deny this possibility to Black Chicago for decades, while walling off the city’s segregated communities and perpetuating generations of racial inequity.
The Chicago Covenants Project has uncovered deed restrictions all over Chicago and the suburbs. Organized neighborhood groups supported by realtor associations once signed up homeowners block by block. Between 1933 and 1937, a mailer was distributed door to door to stoke fears about Blacks moving to Chicago’s North Side, where I’ve always lived. It minced no words: “The Near North Side Property Owners Association proposes to ask every property owner in the district to agree to sell and rent to white people only.”
Even the renowned Newberry Library has a racial covenant.
You may be asking, “what’s your point?”
Well. These buried files prove that racial inequity in Chicago was intentionally created by white people—house by house, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Fresh off a Zoom webinar titled Midwest Reparations, I rushed to my local coffee shop for a takeaway to sip during my upcoming current events group.
“12-ounce coffee in a 16-ounce cup?” The White barista asked. That’s my usual, with room for cream.
“Yes, please. What are all these new pastries? Chocolate cake? Key lime pie?”
“Yep, they’re new. All from different bakeries” said the barista.
“I’ll be back later with friends. They. Will. Love. These.” I said.
The Blackroots Alliance webinar that morning enlightened me on reparations projects in the Midwest. These are nascent activities reviving the 159-year-old “40 Acres and a Mule” policy for emancipated slaves that was promised and then revoked during Reconstruction. The initial focus of current reparations projects is research to uncover the descendants of enslaved people and how they’ve been impacted. Non-Black allies join at the end of the process when it’s time to distribute funds. Research is conducted by the harmed community, Black Americans, particularly African descendants, who look through the eyes of the tortured generations of chattel slavery. Non-Black Americans cannot be trusted to do this research since they see through a different lens: the eyes of the colonizers, the enslavers, the guardians of the dominant culture.
With this new information, I was wondering how I, an old White woman, could fit into the reparations movement as I filled my coffee with half and half and rushed over to my current events group.
The group discussed the news of familiar territory: TFG, the former guy, and his latest legal shenanigans, immigration, climate change, gun control, and the ever-evolving White Christian Nationalism. Afterward, a small group sauntered over to the coffee shop where I’d spotted the new pastries. Six of us pulled up around a small table, coats draped over our chairs, rising one by one to fetch our drinks.
I was the last one to the counter.
“I’m sorry, we can’t serve you.” said the barista.
“What?”
“We can’t serve you. The manager wants to talk to you.” I joined my friends and announced what happened. The manager appeared and asked to speak to me privately.
“We can’t serve you because there’s been a report of you using a racial slur this morning.”
“What? What racial slur?
“The “N” word.”
“Well, there’s a mistake. I’ve never used that word in my life.’
“You understand we have to investigate when something like this is reported?”
“Wait. Are you accusing me of this?
“We have to investigate. Meanwhile, we cannot serve you.”
“For how long?”
“For the unforeseeable future.”
“You’re kidding. Look at me. I really don’t have an unforeseeable future.”
My friends were incredulous. ‘You? Boy, have they got the wrong person.’ They were ready to mount a protest in front of the building, signs and all.
In the following days, I connected with the company’s Chief Operating Officer. She apologized and emailed me a store voucher for $150. That’s a lot of coffee.
The coffee reparations, however, failed to dispel the lingering notion that I’m not a credible witness to my own story, that I’m not sufficiently worthy to be believed. How can we expect descendants of enslaved Africans to automatically manifest self-worth after enduring generations of false accusations, lynchings, and pressed-down powerlessness?
From my window, I can see Lake Shore Drive’s curve at Oak Street, an “S” curve fraught with danger. Some days, as many as five separate car crashes occur from unsuspecting or inexperienced drivers speeding toward the curve and sliding off the road. Heavy gauge ribbed steel barriers prevent errant vehicles from jumping the curb, flying off across a small park, and crashing into the Drake Hotel and vintage apartment buildings on East Lake Shore Drive.
On eclipse day, April 8, 2024, an East Lake Shore Drive building was an arrival point for President Joe Biden’s visit to Chicago. To augment the threat of car bombs speeding down Lake Shore Drive and intentionally barreling off into the building, city salt trucks lined up bumper to bumper on a half-mile stretch of the S curve that hugs the small park on one side and Lake Michigan on the other.
At 2:07 pm, the moon blocked the sun by 94% as I waited in the park with my dog Elsa. A few other dogs tethered to humans stood nearby.
“Is the eclipse happening soon?” I called out to one.
“Yes, right now,” a neighbor announced.
“Here!” He rushed over and handed me his solar glasses so I could see the shadow of the moon crossing the sun.
“Oh, there it is,” I whispered, “I thought the sky would be dark.”
At 94% sunshine, the sky doesn’t turn dark. Even a tiny sliver of the sun is so bright it can light up the sky. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the details of the solar cycle or lunar eclipses. I knew light from that 6% sunshine is so intense it can fry your eyeballs, but I didn’t know that 6% sunshine gives off an intense, vibrant light capable of eliminating shadows.
As I handed the solar glasses back to my neighbor, I looked down at Elsa, standing in the projection of overhead tree limbs. April brought out buds, but still no shady foliage. The images of the boughs, branches, and twigs on the ground were as clear as they were on the trees, like a photo. A perfect mirror image of the deep brown arbor architecture above. Nothing in my memory compared to this. I sensed, though, a deep knowing, as if ancient benevolent familiars had brought me the seeing of a thousand ancestors.
Elsa in the eclipse
“The sun is about a million times brighter than the full moon,” explains Angela Speck, an astronomer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, “So if 99.9% of the sun is obscured,” she says, “there will still be a thousand times more light than the full moon.
I read that in the days before the eclipse, but it held no meaning and slipped my memory. I still had a preconceived notion that the sky would turn black. Experiencing the solar light on the ground, mine and Elsa’s ground, in the valley between the salt trucks and the highrises, revved up my consciousness.
At the Goodman Theater Chicago’s Storytelling class, teaching artist Julie Ganey prompted us to write a “story of changed perspective” based on Goodman’s production of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad.
I had a story in the can, Lunch Money, about a changed perspective, and decided to revise it for the storytelling assignment before I saw the Penelopiad performance. When I finally saw Peneliopiad, I couldn’t see the change in perspective theme—still can’t. Did Penelope change her perspective? Did Odysseus? Who? What?
Had I seen Peneiopiad first (one of the best productions I’ve ever seen in any theater anywhere), I would have written about an experience in honest storytelling.I have lots of those. But, alas, it’s best I don’t sermonize on truthtelling. The following is my change-in-perspective story, which I’ll soon be reciting in person at the Goodman Theater’s “Lobby Stories.” If you’re a regular blog reader, thank you; you’ll understand why retelling this story is important.
Lunch Money Reparations
Reparations are a program of acknowledgment, redress, and closure for a grievous injustice.— From Here to Equality, Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century, by William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen
When I started working as a part-time receptionist in downtown Chicago, I lived with my nine-year-old son in a high-rise apartment and periodically spent more money than I had. Glitzy earrings or a new red lipstick often called to me as I passed through Marshall Field and Company on State Street. I once had my entire purse stolen off the counter as I adjusted my scarf in the mirror.
Over the years, I’ve faced down quite a few street scams and purse snatchings. The worst was the time three teenage boys trapped me in a revolving door at the old Carson, Pirie Scott building. One had yanked on my purse as I entered, but I grabbed the shoulder straps while the accomplice pushed the door in the section in front of me. The accomplice stopped abruptly and held his hands on both glass doors. This left each of us stuck in a different section of the revolving door, awkwardly staring at each other through the glass. They all ran off when a security guard came to my rescue.
I added this grievance story to others like it. Joining the ranks of privileged pseudo-traumatized victims, I loudly condemned an exaggerated version of the bands of criminals marauding downtown Chicago.
As a pensioner, I’ve inoculated myself against criminal assault by carrying nothing but my iPhone and a pocket-size purse where my bus pass, credit cards, and a small amount of cash are stored. Costume jewelry and cosmetics are no longer a retail draw. But I cannot resist accepting Dutch treat lunch invitations from friends, paying no attention to my budget or bank balance.
One day, I sat waiting for a fellow retiree, Peter McLennon, in the lobby of a busy hotel where we’d planned to have lunch. I delved into my ever-present iPhone with heightened curiosity to see if anything big had happened between the time I had gotten off the bus, walked the two blocks to the hotel lobby, and plopped down in the overstuffed chair.
I was so engrossed in the breaking news of a car accident on a distant highway that my senses were dulled to a body stirring in the chair next to me. When the body started in on her story, I momentarily jolted to attention.
“My husband beat me for the last time. I been hidin’ in a women’s shelter but he found me, and now I need to move.”
“What?” I said as much to her as to myself since I was not quite tuned into her voice, my mind drifting in and out of her story while half-wondering what happened to the people in the car crash that was reporting out of my phone behind the now blank screen.
“My social worker found a place in Cincinnati. They gonna hold a room 24 hours. I need $19 for the bus. Can you lend it to me?”
“What?” I looked around to see if Peter was nearby to rescue me.
She repeated her story, adding some details about injuries inflicted by the husband.
“As soon as I get situated in Cincinnati with a place to stay and a job, I’ll pay you back.”
I tested her by asking if she was taking the mega-bus since $19 didn’t seem like enough money for a bus to Cincinnati. That stumped her, but she recovered nicely by describing where the bus station was.
And for one shimmering split second, we caught each other’s eyes and I sensed she knew I was on to her. But she kept up the hustle. I admired that. She was working hard for her money.
I unzipped my little red purse and happily handed her my $20 lunch money. Before I zipped up, she was gone. The scam worked. Relief washed over me as I exhaled the stress of her desperation. Even if I doubted her, she deserved all the money I had for all the years I’d spent harboring both silent and noisy racial bias.
When Peter arrived, he commented on how serene I looked. As we walked toward the restaurant, I asked if he could pick up the tab for lunch.
WBEZ Chicago is celebrating 40 years of one of the greatest concert films of all time, Stop Making Sense, at the Studebaker Theater in downtown Chicago’s Fine Arts Building.
I love this movie. Every Sunday when my son was a toddler, he’d nap as his father studied, and I’d go to the movies. When he was old enough, we went to the movies together, especially on Christmas Day after the divorces, and it was just the two of us. At seventeen, he convinced me to see the Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense at the same Studebaker Theater.
“I don’t like punk rock,” I said.
“It’s not punk. It’s different. You’ll like it,” he convinced me.
He had his own band at the time and knew his music, so I trusted him. He was right. I blasted the Stop Making Sense cassette on my car radio until the tape wore out.
The film documents the legendary rock band Talking Heads performing at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December 1983. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison perform alongside an ecstatic ensemble of supporting musicians.
When my movie buddy Marca Bristo was alive, we went to the movies nearly every Saturday. We’d mull the pros and cons of what we had just seen in the quiet theater afterward before going off to a coffee shop to talk about politics. Marca died in September 2019. The releases that year included Little Women, 1917, and It’s a Beautiful Day in theNeighborhood. Part of mourning Marca meant slacking off on movie-going. I saw only one movie for the rest of the year, Just Mercy, which tells the true story of defense attorney Bryan Stevenson and his client, a black man falsely accused of murder. It was my quiet tribute to Marca, a powerful advocate for disability rights.
These days, I’m wary of catching Covid and all manner of infectious diseases so I’ve been in only one movie theater since March 2020 to see Caste.
But I may have to venture into the old Studebaker theater with its high ceiling and wide aisles to see this old film with old friends who love the old Talking Heads. There’s just nothing like being in a room full of people who love what you love.
(written for Skyline Village Chicago March-April 2024 newsletter)
Robert Kramer, 74, talking to students at the University of Southern California: “You have far more at stake in changing how we approach aging than I do. You are far more likely, statistically, to live past 100 than I am. If you don’t change society’s attitudes about aging, you will be condemned to lead the last third of your life in social, economic, and cultural irrelevance.”
A KFF News article, Do We Simply Not Care About Old People? lays out the blatant disregard for our citizen elders, citing covid-19 statistics.
Around 900,000 older adults have died of covid-19 to date, accounting for 3 of every 4 Americans who have perished in the pandemic. In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners.
Yet, where is the outrage? Experts in the field of aging from around the country all agree ageism has always existed, but the pandemic elevated an intense, hostile prejudice against us.
“The implied message to older adults is: ‘Your time has passed, give up your seat at the table, stop consuming resources, fall in line,’” said Anne Montgomery, 65, of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. She says that baby boomers can “rewrite and flip that script if we want to, and if we work to change systems that embody the values of a deeply ageist society.”
In the years I’ve tried to advocate against ageism, I’ve heard everything from “I’m 80 years old, and I’ve never experienced ageism” to “Ageism? What’s that — not admitting how old you are?”
Gay rights leader Harvey Milk famously said in the 1970s, “Come out to your parents.” He knew, and he was right, that if people got to know gay people (can I say “queer” now?), their bias toward them would diminish.
Anti-ageism advocates say, “integrate, don’t separate.” The best way to overcome the ageist stigma is for the people who are stigmatizing you to get to know you. Don’t put “old” in the closet. Go out. Speak out. Be old.
Chicago has separated the old from the rest of the population — in housing, in social groups, in churches, and in health care. “They” don’t see us. ‘They” look through us. We defend ourselves by saying: I wrote a book! I walked the Camino! I volunteer! I have wisdom! I babysit! Walk dogs! Ride my bike!
Reminding people that we are still here, part of the human experience, walking through life like everyone else at any other age, is the best way to flip that script, not by bragging about our credentials but by our visible presence. And when we can’t hear or when our brain energy gets depleted at 3:00 in the afternoon, we ask people to speak up, and we excuse ourselves to take a nap.
A pamphlet in the back of the church had all the details. The Catholic Marriage Manual. The title revealed nothing to me about the contents. But the sixth-grade boys knew. At recess, the girls followed them into the church from the playground. I was new and needed to fit in. One of the girls grabbed the booklet, and we all ran out to sit under the shady elm at the edge of the parking lot. She read from the booklet, “the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina” to make a baby. “Eww!” The girls squealed. And those boys, standing by the corner of the church, pointed at us and laughed.
To look cool, I desperately wanted to act like I already knew that. But I was so shocked I couldn’t control my facial expressions, and my shaking knees gave way. I could hardly stand up.
I act the same way when I come to some new awareness these days. I blurt out, “What? How come I didn’t know that?”
A boy I wanted to impress once told me Paul McCartney recorded a very high whistle sound in the song “A Day in the Life” so that his pet dog could hear it.
“I knew that,” I said, hoping he was telling the truth and not testing me. Inside my head, I heard, “What? I didn’t know that!”
Being cool was so important that I spent the first half of life pretending I knew more than I did. Over time, in an effort to be authentic, I slowly emerged from that deceptive veil. The lingering consequence of being truthful about myself was that I could no longer swallow my emotions and hide my expressions.
Recently, a friend and I were rehearsing for a talk that we would present to a White audience on microaggressions. “I don’t see color” is a prevalent White microaggression since it’s a refusal to acknowledge the race-based struggles people endure and the discrimination they face. We discussed the outline, who would address what issue, and how to fill the time if no one asked questions. Then he showed me a video he wanted to use of an Asian woman giving a TED talk on microaggressions.
“Are there videos by Black people instead?” I asked.
“There are, but White people often hear this material better if it’s from a light-skinned person.”
“Oh, of course,” I said, as if I knew that.
Suddenly, my breathing sped up. I started sweating and swaying in my chair.
“I have to take a break,” I said.
The awareness that I don’t listen as deeply to Black people as I do to White people filled me with such shame that I almost fainted.
Life was much easier when I learned where babies come from, jumped up, ran around, and tagged the boys in a game of Steal the Bacon. On the playground, we were free to be ourselves, boys and girls, Black, Brown, and mostly White kids whooping it up in a simpler world where there were no microaggressions and we didn’t see color.
On February 15, 1976, I drove my red Toyota ten miles west from my Toms River, New Jersey, home to a small church meeting in Whiting. I’d not had a drink for twenty-four hours. My head was pounding. I shook and shivered and sweated. I sat down but had one foot out the door.
Toms River shoulders the Atlantic Ocean. Most of life there happens near the ocean, its inlets, and brackish rivers. Whiting, known for the now-closed Nature’s Rest Nudist Colony, sits on unceded Leni Lenape land at the northern edge of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. It’s a defunct railroad town surrounded by scrub pines, that dreary little tree that never grows more than eighteen feet because of the sandy soil. No one goes there.
I drove to Whiting to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because I wanted to be anonymous and not run into anyone I knew. I had an overwhelming urge to announce out loud to strangers that I was going to kill myself with vodka.
An active adult community, Crestwood Village, had risen up near Whiting. The eight men and women at the AA meeting were over fifty years old, which was a turn-off for me at twenty-nine. But I was banging on the bottom and had nothing to lose. I thought I’d spill the beans there and bug out for the liquor store on my way home.
The group of eight centered the AA meeting around me and how I could stay sober. They figured out a schedule of who could follow me home that night and stay with me for the next few days. Each day, a different soul appeared on my doorstep to feed me, talk to me, answer the dreaded phone, and connect me to an AA group in my neighborhood. Their messages were the same: you’re sick, we were sick, too. Drink water. Eat chocolate. Go to AA. They trusted me with shocking truths about their lives before sobriety.
They traveled well beyond their small community in the Pine Barrens and re-arranged their comfortable lives to help a suffering alcoholic. The obsession to relieve my misery with booze lifted after about seven days. Each of them called every day for a month.
I never drank again. After a few months, I sold my house, gave away the dog, left an estranged husband, packed up my son and houseplants, and drove to Chicago.
I was a dead soul before I met that group of kind and loving saints in New Jersey’s outback. Every minute of every day, I thought only of drinking and not drinking.
In the forty-eight years since, I’ve met many people who have asked for help. I share the same love that was offered to me that first week. In very few cases, people have stayed sober themselves. Most have disappeared, died, or gotten pissed off and moved on.
One summer in the early 1960s, my mother walked the beach near our Sea Girt, New Jersey home. A shark came into the calm shallow of the Atlantic and chomped off the leg of a man wading right in front of her.
Another that week. And another. Grisly accounts and sightings of man-eating “great whites” all along the central Jersey coast appeared daily in the Asbury Park Press. Lifeguards stood high on their stands and whistled us out of the surf repeatedly at any sign of a dorsal fin. The summer was terrifying.
When Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, Jaws, appeared on the paperback rack, my mother snatched it up, read it, and passed it on. She and everyone else at the Jersey Shore convinced themselves that Benchley, who lived in New Jersey, based the book on our summer shark attacks.
What a book. After eyeing that famous book cover, my seven-year-old son, Joe, became interested in and eventually obsessed with sharks. Having read in Dr. Spock that I shouldn’t tell my child frightening stories, like the crucifixion of Jesus, I kept the Jaws story from him.
The movie Jaws was released the following year. I refused to watch it, much less expose it to my eight-year-old. His sleep was already interrupted by nightmares after getting hit with a pitched baseball at Little League.
At age nine,Joe announced that Jaws was at the neighborhood theater on Dollar Day and begged me to take him. The near-empty theater was spooky. I held both hands over my eyes for most of the show .
“You can open your eyes now,” Joe said.
I did, just as the shark was ripping apart a girl on her raft.
“Oh my god! I’m going to puke! I thought you said it was ok!”
We laughed so hard we could hardly hear the movie. Thus began those funny years when boys learn there’s a big payoff in pranking their parents.
When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, we lived in Chicago.
“Is it about Noah’s Ark?” I asked Joe.
“No. The Ark of the Covenant. You know, where the Ten Commandments are.”
Dragging him to Sunday school all those years had paid off.
We ran to the 1,400-seat Esquire Theater on Oak Street. The only tickets left were upfront. Right there, on the front row, the entire wall before me slithered and hissed as Harrison Ford was lowered into a hypnotic pit of 10,000 snakes.
I shut my eyes.
“OK to look now,” Joe whispered.
And again, I got fooled into watching the creepiest part of the movie, where Indiana Jones is staring down a hooded cobra.
Raiders is set in 1936 and follows Indiana Jones vying with Nazi Germans to recover the invaluable long-lost Ark of the Covenant. Some have interpreted it as Steven Spielberg’s creation to slam the Nazis for the Holocaust. But to me, it’s a hilarious, breathless adventure, made memorably funnier by the prank of my fourteen-year-old movie companion.
And a memorable relief from how I view Nazis today.
This is one of many stories I’ve written about the origin of my existential and nameless fears. As much as I try to analyze a deeper reason for the fears, the stories end up all the same, with a few updates. They seem to write themselves.
In 1949, the Soviet Union started the Cold War by detonating its first atomic bomb, blockading Berlin, and pushing its way into Poland and Eastern Europe. The voices I heard swirling above my head at cocktail hour in our Washington, D.C. home implied the Russians were coming for us.
Poor old Robert Oppenheimer. The father of the atomic bomb wanted nuclear weapons banned after President Truman used A-bombs to murder 180,000 Japanese civilians in 1945. Oppenheimer helped design an air defense of the United States against atomic attacks from the Russians through the National Civil Defense Administration. Common folk wisdom said only cockroaches would survive a nuclear attack. Nevertheless, Oppenheimer’s design required all school teachers to conduct impromptu air raid drills. When teachers shouted an impromptu Drop! us kids jumped out of our seats, crawled under our desks, fell over our knees, and covered our heads. The nuns added the instruction to recite Hail Marys aloud while on the floor.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
At seven years old, I didn’t understand the difference between a drill and the real event. I went to my death every time I huddled under that desk. But, I was not. afraid. to die.
“This is it,” I’d pray, “I’m going to be with Jesus.”
I believed Mother Mary would grab me in her arms like she did baby Jesus and take me to heaven. Why did they pray to avoid such ecstasy? What were they so afraid of?
By the time third grade rolled around, I got used to not dying under the desk. Images of children who lived after their exposure to the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared on our small black-and-white television. I feared that there were worse things than death.
Our Catholic school teachers taught that Communists who ruled Mother Russia prohibited the celebration of the Mass. So we had to pray for Russia while fearing she’d annihilate us at any minute. In those days, at home, my two sisters and I made our own breakfasts and school lunches because my mother’s alcohol intake rendered her unconscious in the mornings. We often gathered around her bed, trying to figure out if she was alive. Holy Mary, Mother of God. One of us would place a finger under her nostrils to feel her breath until, with one exhale, she’d confirm that at least one of our fears was unfounded.
Those early fears seeded my memory and have inoculated me against the mau-mauing of present-day alarmists, naysayers, and fear-mongers who sermonize about the death of our democracy. Yeah-but’ers and tsk-tsk’ers are relentless in efforts to convince me the country is hopelessly overrun with insurrectionists, sexual predators, corrupt politicians and gun-toting scofflaws.
And what if these are apocalyptic times? So what? So were the 1950s, the 1960s, and 1970s.
Mother Mary may be out of commission these days, but I still dream of being with Jesus.
Regan Burke 
