Author: Regan Burke

Regan Burke's book, "In That Number" was a finalist for Chicago Writers Association non-fiction Book of the Year. Her brief memoirs and personal essays appear in the Christian Science Monitor, Sun Magazine, Chicago History Museum "In This Together" Project, City Creatures, Safe 'n Sound, Easter Seals Blog. Chaleur, Rise Up Review, Bird Garden's Murder of Writers and Writing Out Loud. She lives on Potawatomi land in downtown Chicago with Elsa, the West Highland Terrier. Her main activity is reducing the weight of the here and now.

Shutdown Week 12: Anti-Racism ABCs

Dystopian streets boarded up to thwart theives don’t scare me.

Eking out alfresco cafes here and there in the pandemic shutdown, I find a seat.

From my lone coffee chair I hear neighboring chats.

Great pseudo-intellectuals compare this 2020 spring to 1968.

How shallow the words ring from fellow boomers conflating serious demonstrators, hothead window smashers and professional ransackers.

“I was there, you know”, I want to interrupt and say, “in 1968.”

Jacketed in fringed denim and tie-dye.

Kaleidoscope eyes spiritualized reality.

Lucy in the Sky laid down groovy colors on the streets.

Marching on Washington.

Not Lake Shore Drive.

Or Union Square.

Progress not perfection drove our activism.

Quaker’s silent prayers for peace undergirded our courage.

Rolling Stone Magazine announced tickets to Woodstock, a music festival for serious protesters, hippies and dope dealers.

Sinners-turned-saints came marching in with sit-ins and shut-downs.

The mailman delivered March on Washington alerts from the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and Another Mother for Peace.

U fought for civil rights having gone your whole life without knowing one black person.

Violence erupted when non-violent Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis.

We never stopped writing letters, and when we could afford it, we telephoned Washington; the Vietnam war ended, racism didn’t.

Xgen’ers and millennials are younger than me now, older than I was then.

Yeastlike, they rise in the cities demanding “Defund the Police”.

Zenlike, cities bow to the anti-racist revolution, even my city. Maybe.

Applauding the masked and unmasked demonstrators, I have hope.

Black lives may finally matter in my

Curious covid coronavirus city, Chicago.

Shutdown Week 11: Wild Weekend

I’ve been cooped up so long that it didn’t even occur to me to put Saturday’s protest march in my calendar. When a friend texted me about it I thought, “Hm. Should I go? Not go?” I’m a chronic protester and the seventy degree partly sunny weather was perfect for a march. What held me back? Social distancing. Coronoavirus. Covid-19. Pandemic. Vulnerable. I recoiled from visions of the no-justice-no-peace viral load shouting into the air and landing on me.

But there was something more to my hesitancy. Something more basic, deeper than protecting my own health. I want to be in that number when the saints march in with the solution. One more march protesting the licensed execution of a black man by a white man fell short of that solution.

The block-long parade of peaceful protesters chanting and chugging past my building Saturday afternoon gave me reason to pause my podcasts, stretch my legs, grab a Ginger Ale, and take a look.

Why was the group so small? Oh, well, back to the Axe Files for Ezra Klein and David Axelrod pointing out America’s polarization is driven by race. No solution there.

On my evening walk with Henry I wondered why the Rush Street restaurants with bustling shutdown take-out activity were suddenly shuttered. The couture Oak Street stores were boarded up again after spending the previous week removing the pandemic plywood in anticipation of opening for business. The smell of plywood and sounds of buzz saws and hammers filled the air as workers boarded up store after store. Were they really expecting looters from such a peaceful protest?

I turned on the TV. Mayor Lightfoot declared a nine p.m. to six a.m. curfew. Every major city in the country had erupted in violence all at once. Police cars were turned over and set on fire. State Street stores were smashed and looted. The city raised the Chicago River bridges to keep the danger from spilling into my neighborhood.

So I thought.

If Chicago erupted into a war zone Saturday night, Oak Street was the equivalent of Sherman’s March to the Sea. I entered the east end of the street early Sunday morning. A wide open empty U-Haul truck was smashed into a vintage storefront. Maurauders had ripped off the fresh plywood, broke through windows and looted every store. Collateral trash lined the streets and sidewalks. I fixated on a Versace shoe box strewn on the curb next to a disrobed

and de-limbed mannequin. A middle-aged man came along and kicked the box open. He had shoes hung with tags tucked under his arm. On the prowl for left-behinds from the professional thieves, he smiled like we were on a scavenger hunt together.

I stilled myself. In the quiet, a quote from playwright Idris Goodwin, kept fluttering around my thoughts. “This is not the intermission. This is the stage.” Will I ever actually believe we’re on the same stage, an ensemble supporting the same story? The solution I seek stirs there.

Shutdown Week 10: Memorial Day

Shortly after May 30, 1957, our 38-year-old mother Agnes, weakened by anemia and chronic drinking went to bed for three months. She delegated the care and feeding of newborn Stacy to my sisters and me.

Ten-year-old Gael spent endless steamy hours sterilizing glass baby bottles. Twelve-year-old Maere used her authority as the oldest to redo the assignments in order to do the least amount of work. We all took turns feeding the baby. Meanwhile our father was commuting to downtown Chicago by train from our anglicized Irish-American enclave, as part of a brief effort to be a sober citizen, husband and father.

“Women should always have babies in the summer,” Agnes would say, “in case they’re colicky, they’ll be soothed under the trees by the sounds and the shadows of the leaves.” She’d mutter ‘idiot’ under her breath anytime another mother announced the birth of a baby in any other season. And indeed, three of her four babies were born in May, June and July. She pretended she planned it that way.

fc9d4de2-7d3a-4cb0-b30a-0b5a1b8c74d0 — “Live Oak Shelter” Karen Lynn Newman 2020 Dailypaintworks.com

My job was to walk collicky Stacy around the neighborhood in her baby carriage, hoping the swaying of the leaves would soothe her distressed stomach. Carl Jung tells us Agnes simply passed on an inheritance—the collective unconscious of Irish tree worship that supposes tree fairies live in high branches watching over us.

My mother’s life was rooted in addiction—less like the tranquil trees, and more like the life-sucking aphids. Yet, her words gave my family a love for trees—a priceless, ancient, tranquilizing inheritance.

It’s taken a lifetime for me to understand my mother was spiritually in tune with the earth, its seasons and its creatures. As soon as Stacy was able to sit up and clutch the handlebars of my bike, I rode her around introducing her to birds, clouds, the sun. I had a hunch her life would be happier if she could name her birds before she had to memorize the ABCs. Agnes gave us that.

Until 1970 we observed Memorial Day on May 30. Now its the last Monday in May. This year we involuntarily honored the Covid shutdown. There were no beginning-of-summer public celebrations during pandemic-stricken Memorial Day weekend. My habit is to observe Memorial Day on May 30, Stacy’s birthday. That day marks the start of summer when leafed-out trees relieve winter doldrums. This Memorial Day I pray the trees soothe my baby soul as I emerge from the worrying world to a new normal.

Shutdown Week 9: Dream Time

A navy blue velvet shirt arrived in the mail from J.Crew the other day. Thinking it was a gift, I rummaged through the packaging for a hint of who sent it. Turns out I had backordered it ages ago, when I was going places. Blue velvet would have been lovely for my book launch in March, 2020.

But.

The publisher recently told me the book will be on Amazon by October. Then in a surprise move last week he posted on Instagram:

Tortoise Books: We are launching IN THAT NUMBER by @reganchicago THIS OCTOBER! It’s a thrilling and heartwarming memoir about one woman’s journey from the streets of protest to the halls of power, with fascinating firsthand reminisces about Woodstock, Vladimir Putin, THE EXORCIST, Bill Clinton, and more! Stay tuned for details.

I guess the Amazon availability triggered the book launch. But what do I know? The answer is—nothing about publishing or marketing a book. My completed memoir, fully edited, trussed and ready for prime time left my control in December 2019. I dreamed of the day I would stand in front of a crowd of friends in late winter at my book party.

At the party I’d be showered with compliments, jeter des fleurs, as the French say. I’d hold my book overhead and shout, “I did it.” I must have ordered that forgotten velvet shirt at the time to celebrate crossing the finish line. The coronavirus didn’t stop movement on publishing, but the shutdown slowed incoming blurbs for the book cover. Reviewers must have cast my manuscript into the suspended-indefinitely heap. I stopped asking the publisher or even wondering “when will it be out?” for the same reason. Everything else in the world came to a halt, why not book printing?

Here’s what I’ve learned ambling along book-publishing lane. These apply to unknown authors only:

1. A full length memoir is no more and no less than 250 pages, Times New Roman, double spaced, 12-point type, 60,000 words.

2. Non-fiction titles should be five words or less.

3. When you tell people you wrote a book, they’ll ask you what it’s about. Have a good answer.

4. Dreaming up chapter titles is a monumental waste of time. Just number them.

5. However long you think it will take to get your finished work published, it takes longer.

6. Even though a full length memoir is episodic, it needs an arc or storyline. You can’t just put all your 500 word essays in chronological order.

7. The first time your editor sends edits, it’s not really edits. It’s questions.

8. Learn to deal with jealousy.

The Chicago Reader headline this week screams, The Summer That Won’t Be. You know what they can add to that list? My book launch. Visions of myself as a published author is alive beyond the still point though, squiggling around in dream time.

If the coronavirus still spooks us in October my book will launch on Zoom. Look for me in blue velvet throwing flowers at myself.

Jeter des fleurs.

Shutdown Week 8: What Would Agnes do?

What would Agnes do (WWAD) during the coronavirus pandemic? Agnes had an uneasy way of placing wedge occurrences in her life, like being married, onto the long arc of output history. Her pastimes, smoking and drinking, fit nicely into an imaginative destiny all her own. She believed she was meant to smoke, meant to drink, that they were a sign of the times and not to be missed because of some pollyannaish medical or social admonition about motherhood. Nothing would have stood in the way of her scotch, beer and Marlboros. She was destined to have them.

Along side the subliminal moral compass WWJD (What Would Jesus Do), I act and react from a Pavlovian response to my mother’s teaching, character and personality. WWJD helped replace a lot of the bad stuff with certain social mores, like not stealing and staying sober. Stealing and drinking came so naturally to Agnes that by the time it occurred to me my mother might be setting a bad WWAD example, she’d already shut the door on self-reckoning. And I had to suffer through reckoning of my own.

She would have loved being in the midst of a pandemic, entering the shutdown as if it were a fun house full of reasons to drink jumping out at every turn. If I had said we must social distance ourselves, she would have said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” No earthly situation of hers held destiny captive. She would have known the virus and all that went with it were temporary disruptions to help justify consuming more alcohol, smoking more cigarettes.

It’s not that Agnes was a rule-breaker. It’s that the rules didn’t apply to her in the first place. She would not have adhered to mask wearing, six-foot distancing and certainly not staying in her lane at the grocery store. She would have swallowed up the news, argued over every tidbit, insisting she was right and driven everyone in the house to their corners.

Medical appointments cancelled? School conferences shut down? What a relief! Except for clothes shopping, motherly obligations drove her nuts. Curling up on the couch with her beer, cigarettes, a mystery novel or the New Yorker were her destiny. She raged against anyone who tried interrupting her routine or attempted to rearrange her destined spot in the universe. Being told to stay home would have been the only rule she’d have upheld and savored.

WWAD hasn’t left me completely. Cozying up to the couch reading mysteries and the New Yorker is fine with me for as long as it takes. I love her for that hard-wired legacy.

But thank God I’ve ditched the booze and the cigarettes.

Shutdown Week 7: Unknowing

The first change I faced for the Covid 19 shutdown was the suspension of classes and groups for older adults at the Center for Life and Learning (CLL) in my neighborhood church. The cancellation announcement infuriated me. For an entire day, I thought it was the only shutdown announcement, the only group activity suspended.

The media had been continually reporting that people over sixty were more vulnerable to coronovirus than the rest of the population. Shutting us down was our best protection. My wounded ego jumped to the conclusion that we, as a group, would be thought of as weak, defeated and sick, putting a frame around the ageism I struggle to define in myself

a75f6596-2b75-494a-8c9f-14cde7f7646e — Mammoth Mountain Sky by Sharon Schock Sharonschock.com

and in the public square. I stuck myself in a cloud of unknowing.

It was mid-March. I bundled up to walk a long way around to the church for the last event before the shutdown, the CLL yearly Art Show.

How to express my agitation? Old people were being singled out. Excluded.

That’s when I ran into one of the pastors on his way down the street to the Red Line.

“We’re cancelling services.” He said.

“Huh? How long?”

“Unknown. It’s all going to be livestream. We have to figure out Zoom for other gatherings.”

His worried expression hit me like a ton of bricks. He didn’t crack his normal smile, nor did he put a jokey spin on the situation.

“It’s serious.” He said.

“So, It’s not just old people?”

At the Art Show I gathered with friends and reported the news .

No Sunday services.

I eavesdropped on other conversations. Eavesdropping has become one of the social distancing casualties I miss the most.

“They say we might have classes on Zoom.”

“What’s Zoom?”

“Some kind of computer conferenceing.”

“I’m not doing that. I’m sick of technology.”

“Me too. I don’t want to learn anything new.”

“Well, it won’t be for long. Maybe a week. Maybe two.”

We’re in the seventh week now.

I fell victim to the fear of the unknown and refused to learn Zoom for about six days. But I longed for the energy of the collective silence in my meditation group. Others did too and meditation became the first Zoom hosted by CLL.

About fifteen of us spend twenty minutes each Monday and Friday sitting in silence in our Hollywood Squares with our eyes closed. Afterwards we each say a few brief words. We know a smattering of particulars about each other.

What could I possibly miss that I can’t do on my own?

In The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth century monk teaches when we know enough and we don’t need to know more, an opening through the clouds to the sun or the moon brings us to an endless, wordless, deeper knowing. Contemplatives call this love.

This is why I yearn to sit in silence with fellow meditators. We know each other through the clouds of our own wordless unknowing. I call this love.

Shutdown Week 6: Solitude

The coronavirus shutdown forces me to sit in silent contemplation, doing my best to control the one thing I think I can—my thoughts.

American buddhists say people in the West are afraid of solitude, of being alone. That’s not my fear. I fear the future. When the threat of coronavirus is over, will I ever leave home again? Will I ever chance gathering with friends or strangers in a group for a common purpose, a protest march, choir practice, church, AA meetings? Lunch even? How would I fit into the world with no connection outside of myself and Henry the dog? What would be my purpose? No wonder loneliness shortens life. It will kill you, this lack of purpose.

Hmm. Two fast-walkers below my window dressed head to toe in black spandex, masked like bandits. What are they talking about? Are they planning to rob the bank on the corner? Do they know the polar ice cap is melting and will soon spill over into Michigan Avenue? Perhaps they’re headed to Northwestern to get tested for coronavirus. I hope they bow to the angels fluttering around the Emergency Room.

Down the street gardeners dig up winter to plant spring by the goldfish pond. Those goldfish swam around that manmade pond the entire winter.

9866AA95-DEAF-4A8A-98C7-2CC99531B87A_1_201_a — Out with winter. In with spring

Blackbirds jump from branch to branch on the budding leafless tress awaiting the gardeners’ departure. They swoop in for a scratch-around in the fresh mulch, but ignore the goldfish. They’re not fishers.

The backup whistle on the garbage truck that normally blends in with early morning noise? It now pierces the street from the otherwise empty alley. Cars are so infrequent these days that instead of tires rolling over the road with a steady hum, their sound breaks the air with a hiss. hiss. hiss. Where are they going? If I had a car I’d be driving around too. I’d drive up and down the Drive to be close to my own wild lake. The mayor closed the lake path and parks for good reason. Chicago loves to be out. We’d gather there, on the lakefront, congregate. Spread the virus.

Those words are my thoughts from five minutes of meditation. This is how I talk to myself. How embarrassing. My interior life is a tragic waste of imagination—that grammar, those articles, prepositions and pronouns. The mundane. Oh, to be a poet.

On Being’s Krista Tippett hosted Stephen Batchelor, a Tibetan Buddhist on Sunday morning. His new book, The Art of Solitude, made a fitting subject for the Shutdown era. He said indulging in myself leads to inward wisdom and outward compassion. The integration of the two make me fully human. I’m game to be fully human, to be wise and compassionate.

But for now, I must get control of my thoughts.

9ADC9E1E-E14E-4D2B-9E83-93233BB76096_1_201_a — Alone on Oak Street Chicago 11:00 am April 27, 2020

_________________________________________________________________________

Before Coronavirus We Were Dying of Loneliness

On Being: Stephen Batchelor: Finding Ease in Aloneness

Shutdown Week 5: Masks Unseen

Until the beginning of April, the Center for Disease Control, health departments, doctors, scientists and pundits advised us to wear a mask only if we had symptoms. Then the message changed. We learned there were people with coronavirus who have no symptoms. A cloth face covering is recommended for everyone now to prevent us from giving it to and getting it from each other.

All of a sudden everyone wore a mask. For about ten days.

On a mid-April Saturday, Henry studied the sudden arrival of daffodils, marking his spot. We’d walked less than a half a block before I breathlessly yanked my homemade mask off. The lightweight cotton had turned into a heat chamber about to asphyxiate me. I wasn’t the only one. Everyone’s mask was askew or nonexistent in the warmer weather. And that was the end of widespread mask use in the neighborhood.

The inconvenience of non-essential work has come upon the privileged. A neighbor can’t get her dishwasher fixed because our building management has deemed it a non-essential repair. I tried to replace a light bulb in the lamp by my reading chair and it broke off, leaving the guts screwed in place and me holding the glass bulb. The maintenance man said “no”. Even though I played the old lady card, it’s not essential that my aging eyes have light to read. “Watch TV,” he said.

We’re not exactly on Cormac McCarthy’s Road, or settling into deprivation. But ordering groceries online has taken a turn. There are no delivery times available for the old stand-bys. I’m told to “check back later.” The store with the only coffee beans I like isn’t accepting online orders “at this time”. “Check back later” has taken up residence on my computer screen.

My computer screen is where I go to church. It’s livestreamed. Only it’s not exactly live because the preacher last Sunday admitted to recording the sermon. When the artificial worship service came into view the livestream accentuated all the elements of church I despise–the dead symbols, rituals, robes. And then the preacher delivered a walloping good sermon about “thriving in belief”.

“For now, caring for our neighbor by sheltering in place is believing in the unseen.” he said.

That’s me. You’re staying home for me. And I you. I believe this unseen selflessness will protect me, and you.

Do I like this virtue being forced on me? Not one bit. I’d rather make my own choice. I know what those protesters are up to. This is America. The government can’t tell us to stay home. It’s the Screwtape Letters in action. The master devil is telling his student to tempt us into saying God is on our side while tricking us into believing only in ourselves. If Granny gets sick and dies, it’s not because we gathered together in church, at a barbecue or a cocktail party. It’s God’s will.

That’s me, too. Belief in the unseen reveals my secret selfishness and depravity. And it allows me to self-correct, sight unseen, to receive the virtue. I don’t know how that works. I simply thrive in the belief.

Shutdown Week 4: Shame

House sparrows have been chirping at my window. They’re abundant on my city street and in the spring they emerge from their winter hiding places looking for food. Last year for the first time, European starlings appeared. Sometimes I think I hear robins and cardinals but starlings mimic the sounds of other birds. They’re trying to trick me into putting bird seed out for the more colorful birds, not knowing I love them equally.

Gutsy red-winged blackbirds abruptly premiered on the railing of my balcony, sucking the breath out of me. Their distinctive one-second long, loud musical trill called me from the breakfast table. Jet black bodies shouldered with red and yellow feathers held on fearlessly as I moved closer to the window. For years I’ve had black furniture with red and yellow highlights, imitating red-winged blackbirds.

A friend called from Florida to say Happy Easter as I was tethering Henry for his morning walk.

“It’s Easter?”

“Yes! It’s Easter,” and we laughed in that old familiar way, like we just discovered each of our days slips from one to another like egg after egg slipping into boiling water. We starting talking about the Shutdown. I extended Henry’s walk farther along Lake Shore Drive sensing a longer iPhone conversation.

“I can’t watch the news. Can’t talk about him,” she said.

I understand, of course. It’s what we all say and like all of us, she ended up talking about it anyway—said the Democrats need to present an answer to the question “why” to win in November.

“The Democrats have moved their convention to August about the same time as my book release,” I said. “Let’s go to Milwaukee and sell books out of the trunk of the car, a trunk show!” We’ve had such adventures in the past, but plans cannot be made until the Shutdown is resolved.

The outside world has been a physical threat since St. Patrick’s Day. At first I was in danger of someone sneezing on me. I’m in the vulnerable group. Now others are in danger of me sneezing on them. I may be an asymptomatic coronavirus carrier.

Henry and I ended up sitting in the bus stop sheltered by an unexpected spring warmth. Walkers have taken to the street lately because the sidewalks aren’t wide enough to keep the reqiured social distancing. A woman in an ominous medical mask, six feet into the street, walked by and gave me a long evil eye. I’ve been wearing a cowgirl bandana for my mask and I neglected to re-cover my face after it slipped down when I was on the phone. Shaming eyes have replaced smiles and waves on the street. Watch out if you forget your mask. You’ll need to mend your wounds with a Brene Brown Ted Talk on shame from the daggers shooting out of your neighbors’ gaze.

The Stay Home battle cry presents no threat though. Settling into social isolation, I watch masked neighbors from the window.

And I pray for a visitation from the woodpecker I heard the other day.

Shut Down Week 3. Tagging

One of the boarded up stores I walk Henry past everyday is Hermes, a Parisian couture import. You can buy a Hermes over-the-shoulder mini bag just big enough for your cell phone, keys and plastic poop bags (if you’re walking Henry) for $1,875.00. On the very first board-up day, a tagger spray-painted one of Hermes’ dark grey boards with a

tasteful lavender scribble. The contrasting colors were delightful really, very French. And the next day, the street art was gone, painted over in Hermes signature dark grey.

Like the Buddhist arhat, Irish banshee and today’s death doula, the mythical greek Hermes is a psychopomp, or soul guide. Powered by his winged sandals and helmet, he guides the soul into death, to the other side. Crows are also psychopomps often depicted waiting in murders outside the home of the dying to herald the soul’s journey or perched inside the chamber as in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”.

Crows are sparse these days on downtown Chicago streets. There’s no discarded food to forage in the alleys behind the restaurants. Oh, sure, the restaurants are providing take-out, but all that trash goes home to another neighborhood’s compost. The heralding crow has taken her business elsewhere. No one is bothering to die a natural death here. We are all in a state of shutdown limbo. Indeed I never hear the usually frequent ambulance sirens headed to the hospital a quarter of a mile away. The covid-infected dying are taking cabs to the Emergency Room, hoping they won’t be turned away or sent to the field hospital at the McCormick Place convention center.

Hermes is known as Mercury in Roman mythology, from a Latin derivative meaning merchandise. I love the window displays but I have no reason to step across the Hermes threshold and finger the merchandise. These days I think of its namesake as a hallmark to protect the life of commerce in the city. I hope Hermes/Mercury doesn’t let the city die.

I have to grab hope wherever I can. It was Hermes’ sister Pandora who opened the box that unleashed plagues, diseases, and illnesses on the world. Our current Pandora, President Trump, has unleashed the coronavirus on us in opening wide his box of ignorance, inaction and mismanagement. The myth says Pandora closed that box before the healing spirit Hope escaped. President Trump spews false hope to us everyday with lies, inaccuracies and ego-driven platitudes.

Hope seeps out on its own power though, just like the spray-painting tagger letting us know the street is still alive.