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.

Normal/Abnormal

Two nests of crow chicks fledged on my city street this past week. I wonder if the high-rise humans down the block noticed the chicks’ noisy beginning of life in the urban wild. Everyday for two weeks, I looked up from under the trees while walking Elsa. I saw the chicks poking their hungry beaks out of the nests, then stepping out to bounce from leafy limb to limb to rooftop to balcony, squawking away. The parent crows flew farther and farther, screaming at their offspring as encouragement to get those wings flapping and join them in pursuing edible horizons. And then, quiet. They’re gone. They’ll be back, of course. But for now, the daily racket of new young crows has flown the coop.

How comforting to observe the steadfast natural order of things. These days, the built world I’ve known my whole life is breaking down so fast that I half expect the natural world to follow; Lake Michigan to dry up and all the birds to drop from the sky. That bad? Sometimes. Experts say old-age limits short-term memory, exaggerates long-term. My long-term emotional memories are thus resistant to age-related decline. I’m in my 80th year, having just celebrated the 79th. The fear I felt watching the original Mad Max (1979), Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Blade Runner (1982) bubbles up without reference to those movies. It simply presents itself as the world we know is over.

On the other hand, I’m convinced The Wizard of Oz gave me a love for birds, if not a curiosity about an unearthly world. Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow; why, then, oh why can’t I?

Yeah, why can’t I?

Every time a crow chick leaves the nest, some transcendental part of me follows. My earliest dreams were flying visions. I willed myself off the ground and flew around the neighborhood spying on people. God help me, if I had a drone. I’d probably be peeking in the windows of high-rise residences.

There’s no question movies have influenced my core. They’re not saving me from worry, nor diverting the fear of living in a militarized police state. That long-term memory perverts itself into real and present danger. Can the now-pardoned Jan 6 insurrectionists show up as a Mad-Max-type private army? Would there be a search and rescue operation if my transatlantic ship capsized like the Poseidon? And worse, will there be an antidote for experimental robots gone bad as in Blade Runner?

Fortunately, the clouds of knowing break open every morning to a normal reality. Recent shoulder surgery grounds me in pain. Friends gather for coffee. My granddaughter is marrying a super guy. Regulars show up at church. The same 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are read at every meeting. The “No Kings’ protest is actually a movement. The rabbits are back in the park. Elsa goes for walks.

Normal and abnormal live side by side.

For now.

Fear of Kudzu City

The gardeners in the small neighborhood park I call my own, butchered the beauty out of the spring flowers and attendant bird migration. In their zeal to prune away the dead and diseased tree branches, they yanked out all non-native “invasive” species. This disrupted the seasonal pattern of our expectations. As I wandered through the other day, a neighbor with her spaniel in tow stopped me.

“What happened to our flowers?” She yelled across the boxwood.
“The gardeners mulched it all into last years’ compost.” I said. I don’t know her, but here we were joined by a sudden mutual experience.
“They went too far! Can’t you do something about it?”

Me? I must have spoken with authority about the Chicago Park District’s program to remove invasive species and introduce native plants. As usual, I imparted knowledge based on next to nothing. Last summer as my allergies exploded, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about the Park District planting more allergen-producing native plants, like goldenrod. A passing employee of the Chicago Park District once educated me on the park’s introduction of native plants, especially those glorious hibiscus. And a neighbor who is a volunteer gardener at the Lincoln Park Zoo spends her summer eliminating “invasives”. That’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

“You can go to the Park District Board meetings and ask about it,” was my know-it-all answer.

But Nature has once again reigned supreme in my city neighborhood. On my street, there is no human control over the crow’s nest and its four chicks that are flapping around in the branches. I watch them strengthen their young wings to fly out from their birthplace and fend for themselves. Wildlife never needs permission to be. But it does need protection.

The New York Times reported this week on one of Chicago’s best nature stories. The Lakeside Center at McCormick Place applied a treatment on its glass building to deter migrating birds from banging into it. Last year up to 1,000 birds died in one night at McCormick Place. This year, the deaths, due to the widow treatment, were down by 95%. Chicago’s unpopular mayor should take credit. For some of us this fact alone is enough to vote for his reelection.

Unfortunately there’s no treatment we can apply to protect ourselves from bumping up against the current man-made enemy that is called the United States of America. What can protect us from dirty air and water unleashed by industrial, vehicle and power plant toxins?

I envision a doomsday scenario, a post-apocalyptic environment like “the Last of Us.” Will my city’s native species die off and be replaced by invasive, toxic-loving kudzu? The White Christian Nationalists setting ecological policy have abandoned the Bible as their guide. Genesis 2:15, in all versions, clearly states we must tend to God’s creation.

NIV: The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

KJV: And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

NLT: The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it.

CSB: The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.

NYT: An Illinois Building Was a Bird Killer. A Simple Change Made a World of Difference.

Chicago’s Urban Wildlife: Embracing Pluralism and Nature

All over early-morning Chicago, garbage trucks back in and out of alleys using rapid beep-beep-beep signals announcing their hulking presence. Elsa the dog and I are indifferent to this annoyance as we take our morning walk. But in mid-April, we both jumped to attention. We heard what seemed like a hundred garbage trucks backing up. The wildly unfamiliar bellowed from a block down the street.

“What’s going on Elsa?” I shouted down to my agitated Westie on the sidewalk. All of a sudden two honking Sandhill Cranes flew through the center of the street below the treetops. Their wingspan swooped past us from sidewalk to sidewalk as they glided and bellowed toward Lake Michigan.

Elsa flew into a barking rage. I lost my breath. My knees buckled. The Sandhill Crane is an ancient animal whose sole purpose is entertainment.

I love these four-foot high red-headed trumpeting birds. I once traveled to the Platte River on the edge of Nebraska’s Sandhills for their spring migration. My friends and I joined serious birders on the 5:00 am riverbank to view 600,000 roosting Sandhill Cranes. Their summer and winter homes are the northern and southern edges of the Great Plains. They are North Americans, Midwesterners.

Where did this duo come from and where were they going? They were likely in a flock following the Great Lakes Flyway, the migration route to their summer home in the boundary waters between the U.S. and Canada. Perhaps they were lured away by a mischief of rats feasting on the overflowing garbage bins in the alleys of nearby restaurants. Did a garage truck disturb their hunt? Whatever the story, I am deeply grateful they strayed from the flock and flew into my morning fugue.

Fugue? Yes, lately every morning I awake in a seemingly altered state. Oh, I tend a regular household routine, brain-fogged by radio news from the psycho-battleground that is my home country. Any diversion is welcome, particularly wildlife making its way through my city street.

But diversions, like bird spotting, are fleeting. The pluralistic society we’ve known as democracy is under siege. Pluralism, a word as ancient as the Sandhills themselves, one we learned in middle school, has been displaced of late by DEI or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. DEI was corporate America’s answer to the communal guilt stemming from the sight of George Floyd’s on-air murder. The lofty goal of transforming Human Resource departments into offices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion crashed and burned on the heels of Donald Trump’s name-calling presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “DEI” hire. Little did we know then, the summer of 2024. The weaponizing of DEI was not a diversion. Instead, it was a tactic in a larger strategy to destroy pluralism and make America White and Christian.

Interfaith America, the nation’s premier interfaith organization, has come to the battlefield now — taking the case for pluralism to the streets. A giant digital billboard in one of the most diverse locations in the country, Times Square, New York City, shows Interfaith America’s devotion to American pluralism. The message: diversity makes our country stronger. I’m in here, proud to represent my cohort, old white ladies with their dogs. Take a look.

Our President, Our Enemy

At Saturday morning coffee in downtown Chicago, a friend and naturalized citizen joined our small group. They work (or by now, worked) at a federal agency where half the workforce had just been fired.

“Are you next?” I asked.

“I wrote a list of things I can do to make money. Nothing to do with my profession but at least I have options,” they said, “I have EU passport and know some languages. My European colleagues are already strengthening connections between their countries. There’ll be jobs.”

Watching TV on February 28, I was like a six-year old sitting cross-legged in front of a life-size screen expecting it to throw itself at me. The Trump-Vance shakedown of Ukraine President Zelensky in the Oval Office presented TV reporters and viewers with a clear and present danger. The US just changed sides. We would now be the puppet ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The reporting immobilized me. What happened to Putin the mortal enemy? Another historical norm thrown onto the MAGA heap of used-to-be’s. Cafe societies the next day ratcheted up conversations about how to leave the country.

Our President was now our enemy.

How I want to write more about my friend! Their story about growing up behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War intrigues this nosy Midwesterner. But I fear exposing my friend to gotcha algorithms that worm around the internet. I even write “they/them” so the sex can’t be identified.

They said, “Big difference between here and country of my childhood. Before the breakup of USSR, you’d be killed if you wrote forbidden words.”

Alexander Dugin, a friend of Putin’s, on the day of Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, proclaimed that “traditionalism won. Globalism lost. A victory for Russia.”

Globalism has been the hallmark of the devil in fundamentalist Christianity since before Jimmy Carter’s presidency. At my small fundamentalist Christian church in the 1970s, a friend pulled me aside one Sunday during coffee hour. She said Jimmy Carter’s White House Conference on the Family was diabolic. We were both former hippies. We grew cabbage in our back yards. We made our own yogurt. We balanced our immune systems with apple cider vinegar. I thought I knew her.

A Christian convert, she’d been exposed to the idea that Carter would lay out his progressive American family values. Then spread those ideals around the world through programs like USAID.

“Carter is promoting globalism,” she said. “He wants all families to think like him.”

Preposterous? Yeah. I thought so too.

New York Times columnist, David French, is the original Never-Trumper. An evangelical Christian, French teaches history and the constitution. He explains Trumpism from a biblical point of view. Prophesying Christians, Pentecostals and traditionalists believe the Devil is the force behind globalism. Prophesied in the Bible. These Christians tell Trump he’s God’s man to lead America out of the spiritual darkness of globalism, especially because he survived a gunshot to the head. Trump’s leadership in anti-globalism, divvying up the world pie between the four leaders, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, is victory over the Devil. Oh.Yeah.

Long before Trump, when insecurity and doubt began settling in my young joints, I was desperate for certainty. I fell for these biblical prophesies, these absolutes. I sobered up, married and mothered a boy. I worked in a stain glass factory and had a garden. Despite these, I fell into a years-long fever dreams submitting to charismatic prophesying men. When I woke, a Presbyterian preacher told me doubt was good, certainty wasn’t. Putting church friends behind me, I rejected the prophecies of Christian fundamentalism.

Strangely, I thought everyone else did too.

Anita Bryant’s Legacy: Gay Rights Activism

As I was about to cross the threshold toward the elevator with Elsa tethered to my thick gloves, I reached back for the handle to close the door behind me. At that moment, WBBM news radio announced Anita Bryant had died. Out in the park, Elsa tiptoed on the crunchy December earth — a slower walk leading to a longer think. Memories arose about Anita Bryant and her anti-homosexual campaign in the 1970s.

Anita Bryant, a Miss American pop singer who sold Tropicana Orange Juice on TV was so well-known in US culture that her startling attack on homosexuality betrayed her seemingly good-natured Christian persona.

Elders in the fundamentalist Christian cult where I spent a few years in the 1970s never addressed homosexuality. They also ignored any other moralistic culture clash that evolved because of Bryant’s media campaign. I doubt any of us in that community even knew a homosexual. Oh, there were instances of men going off on drug-addled toots and ending up in gay bath houses. They’d come crawling back to church asking forgiveness from an uncomfortable congregation that had no knowledge of gay life. I was never sure what we were meant to forgive since no sin was committed against us.

Bryant, sparked by a Dade County, Florida decision to protect sexual orientation as a civil right, created the Save Our Children coalition to build anti-gay public support. She succeeded. In June 1977, the Miami area voted against homosexuality as a civil right, an act that lasted twenty years.

Fresh from the Florida victory, Anita Bryant brought her teethy bigotry to Chicago to perform a white-bread repertoire including her signature “Paper Roses” at the Medinah Temple. She was met by 5,000 gay rights protesters.

Christian churches throughout the country were called upon to take a stand, including mine. Homosexuality was justified as sin through church elders’ literal interpretation of a few bible passages. It became a disqualifying dictum for church membership. I knew nothing about homosexuality. Shunning people, however, didn’t fit with what brought me to Jesus, namely the parable of the Good Samaritan, or love one another, especially the least among us. I’ve needed that Jesus all my life. Extending unconditional love is a hard practice. In fact, it’s really impossible. I’ve always known it’s required of me nonetheless.

Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign invigorated gay activism in the civil rights movement. We had a new cause. We boycotted orange juice. We attended Chicago’s Gay Pride parade that year. We mocked Tropicana’s tagline by wearing t-shirts that said, “A day without human rights is like a day without sunshine.” Gay rights, women’s rights, equal rights, all blended into one big active advocacy movement.

I moved on to La Salle Street Church, which made no small point of accepting all people. Founded by rejects from the Moody Bible Church down the street, these Christians were definitely descendants of the real Jesus. They left Moody because the church elders required blue-jeaned converts to sit in the balcony and wouldn’t allow them to receive the Eucharist. In the 1970s, no one wore blue jeans except anti-establishment long-haired hippies, known these days as Progressives.

The noise generated by the blue-jeaned Christians galvanized the nascent Christian fundamentalists, known these days as White Christian Nationalists.

I’m not sure what happened to separate the civil rights groups. Gay rights, abortion rights, voting rights and anti-violence organizations eventually established their own fundraising machines side-by-side with their own causes. Everyone started marching to a different drummer. We came together to protest the Iraq war and for the pink-hatted Women’s March after the 2016 election. But not all my friends showed at the NATO protest in 2012.

As a straight white old lady, I’ve recently tried with scant success to advocate against ageism. I no longer wear blue jeans. Dress codes are almost extinct. This is evident by Elon Musk’s t-shirt, MAGA hat, and long, black, steampunk coat at an Oval Office press conference.

Anti-ageism is the most difficult cause to rail against. It’s an implicit or subconscious bias, practiced by those who are discriminated against and by those who do the discriminating. Dismissing Elon Musks’ functionaries as teenagers and constantly stating their ages is a display of age-bias. The same applies when stating Joe Biden’s or Donald Trump’s age. Or mine.

“You don’t act like a 78-year old,” remarked a friend last week.

“Yes I do. This is what 78 acts like.” I shot back.

It’s not that age isn’t a good descriptor to place people in their lived experiences. But age as a descriptor is most often used to put people in their place. The unchecked functionaries have stolen my Social Security records inside the US Treasury Department. They are no better or worse than me because of age. They are wrong no matter how old or young they are.

As happened with Anita Bryant, is it too dreamy to imagine a galvanizing backlash? Is a movement forming to neutralize the extreme bigotry falling out of the dirty mouths of Washington DC?

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Click to see Anita Bryant sing, “Paper Roses” https://youtu.be/0UoRKstI8Q4?si=3ar2deoIWIu6YwVN

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MLK: “…only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

On a podcast about grief, artist Laurie Anderson revealed to Anderson Cooper that she felt sad without being sad when her husband, rocker Lou Reed died in 2013. She came to this awareness at a class on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The teacher, Bob Thurman, said there is no dead. Dead doesn’t exist. He was referring, in part, to post mortem existence.

Different concepts of the afterlife exist in most religions and philosophies. For atheists who believe nothing happens after death, Thurman, a Tibetan Buddhist, teaches there is no nothing. Dead is not nothing.

I’m about as sure of what happens when the body breathes its last as I am of next week’s weather. Oh, I tacitly agree with those who suggest I’ll see my dead dogs again, the same way I concur it’s going to snow tomorrow. Maybe. Maybe not. Surely, dead is not nothing?

On November 22,1963, my mother called from New Jersey to the Catholic boarding school where I was sent to “shape up” in Williamsburg, Virginia. I picked up the black handle dangling from its stretched out cord in the one allowable phone booth for us wayward boarders.

“Kennedy’s been shot.” She said.

I replied, “I know. He’s dead. It’s on the radio.”

There’s a reason my mother called me. She knew, even at seventeen years old that I’d be upset, more like hysterical. Politics had grabbed me as a pre-teenager watching the Vietnam war on TV. By the time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, I, a twenty-two year old hippie, had been to two marches on Washington and written hundreds of letters to Congress and President Johnson. I was in support of the Civil Rights bill, the Voting Rights bill, banning the bomb and against the Vietnam war. Anytime the morning news stirred an injustice I had to fix, I reached for my stash of pre-stamped postcards to fire off messages to Congress. I harangued my friends—at work, in bars, on the beach, at parties—to think and talk like me. They didn’t. I kept going.

MLK’s admonition, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,” initially whipped me into a frenzy of activism—more letters, more phone calls, more marches, more recruiting. Then in his “Drum Major Instinct,” speech in 1968 he preached to act as a servant, not a savior. It is noble to help just one person, change one person’s viewpoint, get one person to vote. Gradually, I adhered to King’s spirit and put into practice a daily mindfulness mantra: the worries of the world don’t own me, I don’t own the worries of the world.

DNA has proven dead is not dead. DNA, our physical manifestation of life itself, apparently lives forever. Anyone who has had a DNA test questions their reported trace variants of first peoples like Neanderthal listed in their results, as if our DNA was there at the beginning, or, before? Some religions teach physical immortality, that our dead bodies will rise (or have risen) to live in Paradise. It begs the question: wherever our raised bodies take up residence, will they have our same DNA?

Martin Luther King’s DNA lives in the generative marrow of his words. I always feel sad, without being sad on this day, his birthday, like Laurie Anderson grieving over Lou Reed. His death forever transitions into the endorphins between my dreams and awareness. He lives in that zero-gravity mirage of my inner life that says: serve, get out there, be brave, do it, say it.

Yep. Dead is not nothing.

Listen: Laurie Anderson & Anderson Cooper

(updated from 2023 MLK day)

Cold Inaugurations

As an eighth grader I entered segregated St. Mary’s of the Assumption for two months at the end of the school year. My family had come apart in the Chicago suburbs and one of my sisters and I were sent to live with relatives in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Whites and Blacks mingled at St.Mary’s only on the playground where I pitched in the integrated baseball games.

On our first Sunday at St. Mary’s Church, my sister and I headed for the back pews. A white man ushered us out of our seats toward the front. Only Blacks sat in the back. The Sunday my mother visited from her temporary home in New Jersey, she pushed the usher aside and sat us all in the back. Her hangovers would not allow suffering through the entire hour of the Mass. She needed a quick exit after the obligatory Eucharist and delighted in integrating the back pew.

One day St. Mary’s eighth grade class was bussed down the way to Andrews Air Force Base to greet President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Blacks in the back of the bus. Whites in the front. Having so little experience with segregation, I was sure it was wrong but had no idea how to take a stand. I wished my mother had come along to integrate the bus. We waved little American flags at President Eisenhower as he deplaned Air Force One, Blacks lined up on one side, whites on the other. It was 1959.

Sixteen years later in a sleepy Jersey Shore borough, I read about Jimmy Carter’s campaign for president in Time Magazine. What caught my attention was Carter, as governor, in a surprise to fellow Georgians had denounced racism and segregation. I sent a note to Jimmy Carter, applauded his positions on race and volunteered on his campaign. He sent me a hand written thank you note.

When we received an invitation to Carter’s Inauguration, there was no question that my then-husband and nine-year old son would head to Washington DC for the January 1977 swearing-in. Sitting high up on bleachers on the shady side of the Capitol, it was as cold as any day I can remember. Twenty-eight degrees with a wind chill to equal fourteen.

My grandchildren, C.J. and Kirby, were 10 and 12, when we flew from Chicago to brave twenty degrees with 1.8 million others for Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. We stood for hours on the frozen ground by the Native American Museum on the Mall. Every once in a while I’d ask my shivering grandchildren if they wanted to go inside. No they didn’t! The clutch of strangers that formed in our section treated us like family—retrieving packs of hand warmers from a far-away tent for the inside of our mittens and boots.

It was sunny. Cold. And glorious.

Obama quoted Founding Father Thomas Paine in his in Inaugural address.

”Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet.”

Black Hole Jesus

First Holy Communion is a right-of-passage ceremony in the Roman Catholic Church where a seven-year-old is initiated into eating the body of Jesus Christ. I learned the elements of the Catholic service, the Mass, with my classmates in the second grade. The priest transforms the bread into Jesus’ body and the wine into Jesus’ blood. The wine, the blood of Jesus, is reserved for the priest. We the people eat paper-thin white tasteless wafers, the body of Jesus. Catholic children all learn that after we make First Communion, it’s expected we’ll eat the body of Christ every week for the rest of our lives.

“Let it dissolve in your mouth,” the nuns instructed, “It’s a sin to chew the body of Christ. And don’t touch it!”

The pomp and ceremony of my First Holy Communion overshadowed any eww!-ness related to eating Jesus’ flesh. Prim little girls wore white crinolined lace dresses, white shoes and socks, white cotton gloves and angelic white veils. Like brides. Squirmy spit-polished boys wore ill-fitting white suits and ties. Children sang a Gregorian chant, Tantum Ergo, in Latin. The ceremony shined as if the light of heaven broke through the ceiling and blessed us with all good things forevermore.

In the early grades, if anyone questioned how Jesus’ body and blood changed from bread and wine, there was only one answer.

“It’s a mystery,” they said.

I fell hook line and sinker into this ethereal mystical world of Jesus-eating. He was inside me, outside me, all around me, all the time. Jesus, my imaginary friend, was under the bed with me when my parents’ raging drunkenness woke me in the night. And when long-fingered nightmares reached their talons in through the screens, Jesus saved me.

At Jesus’ Last Supper (and his First Communion) before he was tortured and murdered, he broke bread, sipped wine and said, “The is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” Surely Jesus and his father knew what a theological shit storm this would cause for all time. There is no earthly world where anyone could possibly digest all that’s been interpreted by those simple words.

In the upper grades, Catholic clergy gave fuller answers for Holy Communion, the Eucharist, they called it. Explanations always ended with, “It surpasses understanding.” When I joined a non-Catholic Christian church in my twenties, I learned that Protestant Communion is a public display of piety, not a mystery at all, a non-binding sacramental tradition.

Jesus, like the simple chassis of a computer, hides his infinitely more complex workings from the young in faith. It’s good he came as a baby. People love babies. I would have settled for a dog since I love dogs. This human Jesus soothed me as a child. In the second half of life I’m soothed by and troubled by the man or the myth at the same time. Jesus, a synonym for love, is comforting. His hidden complexities are troubling. Questions arise, starting, but never ending with, “Are you real?”

In Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar, a concrete love story moves in and out of a celestial black hole. A black hole forms when a star collapses in on itself, eventually creating a singular point of irresistible gravity. All matter, light, space and time are sucked into it and all instances of time become the present moment.

These days, at my Presbyterian church, I sit motionless at traditional Communion, the Eucharist. When I hear the minister say Jesus’ words ‘do this in remembrance of me’, if I’m aware, I contemplate the past as present, as if in a black hole. The story of the Last Supper reminds me to honor the original Twelve, and others, who were in the room where it happened. They come through a black hole to my pew, in the hope that I see that the whole of the story is swallowed up and Jesus is the present moment.

The veneer of the Communion tradition, like the computer chassis, hides the paradox of a simple complexity. Non-traditional Jesus, that black hole of pure love, that present moment, issues the most complex inhuman commandment, ‘love your enemies.’

Winter Rabbits in the City

Rabbits are born and live out their stories in the same patch their entire lives. The lineage of the fat rabbit I see in the spring may have begun sixty-seven generations back, when the park was first established. After a month or so of observing her in April, she allows me the honor of seeing her two small cottontails, the next generation. They’re never in sight for long before they scurry away to the low brush.

My dog Elsa has old eyes. They may catch the bunnies on the run. Yet, her little legs tire as soon as the furries stop moving. Neither can her thinning olfactory glands sniff out their burrows. I’m pretty sure the rabbits are on to her as they don’t go far. All to say, the wildlife in the little city park seems safe.

Except it isn’t.

On a chilly November morning, I approached the far side of the park with Elsa. I wondered if the rabbits had burrowed in for the winter. I glanced over to the street side of the park to see gardeners unloading a backhoe from their truck. They wasted no time starting that thing up and ramming through the waist-high boxwood hedge to the middle of the garden, ripping out vegetation where the rabbits live.

“Hey! Stop!”

With Elsa at my heels, I barged through the boxwood on my side of the park, flailing my arms. I was about to jump in front of the moving machinery. The driver stopped. His companion came to me.

“What about the bunnies?” I shouted.

“No English!” he shrugged.

“The rabbits! The rabbits! They live there!”

He laughed at me and signaled to the backhoe driver to keep going. They were having a ball.

That was it. I had no choice in the matter. The feral gardeners yanked all the underbrush, faded lilies and droopy irises. They removed the clumpy hostas that cover wild animals and the prairie asters that catch goldfinches and warblers. The backhoe dug holes for six newly planted baby trees.

December is here now. Arborists removed honey locusts and hackberries that no one realized were distressed. The winter trellis of bare branches is spare. Above and below the wide open space leaves no comfort. No place to hide. The left-behind soft brown and grey prairie grass, goldenrod and hydrangea are fallow and forlorn.

But all will be lovely in the spring. And the ancestral rabbits will return.

Whenever one of my dogs died I experienced profound grief that turned to sadness, for a time. A season of sadness. These days, sadness lasts longer. It’s not because my dog died but because so much is out of my control, like the displaced rabbits. I pray not for the sadness to leave me, but to manage to live with it. I have a sense many seasons of sadness are afoot. All may not be lovely this spring.

I wish I had saved those bunnies.

The DOGE and Aging

Adlai Stevenson III (1930 – 2021) entered the 1982 race for Illinois governor just as I had become unemployed. My only memory of that forsaken job, like all the others, is my shameful obsequiousness to the forgettable male boss.

A journalist friend, Paul Galloway (1934-2009) interceded on my behalf to the Stevenson campaign for a volunteer position. Yes, that was necessary. And still. The sublime expression, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent,” originated in a Chicago ward campaign office. Campaigns still scrutinize volunteers with more than an eye roll. Because of my juice through the local newspaper, people were cautious about what was said around me.

I floundered around the office of Adlai Stevenson’s wife, Nancy, who was usually out campaigning. One day, I had the great fortune to be tagged to drive her to Oak Park for an event. That fluke set off a campaign-long assignment as Nancy’s driver.

Nancy and I regularly stepped into community rooms where older adults were having lunch through the federal Meals on Wheels program. Older women would clasp Nancy’s wrist, pull her ear close to their lips and whisper messages for her to take back to her husband. The Meals on Wheels crowd assumed Adlai III was his father, Adlai II, the governor when most of them were young. Nancy, who had a gentle and keen understanding of aging, let most of them hold this holy untruth. She displayed genuine kindness in her friendly interactions with old people who were in obvious cognitive decline. This helped me admit my own subconscious bias toward the aging. My ageism has changed overtime, especially now that I’m old and experience age discrimination against myself and my friends.

Meals on Wheels is funded through the Older Americans Act Nutrition Program which was permanently authorized by Congress in 1972. The purpose is three-fold: 1) reduce hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition; 2) promote socialization; 3) promote health and well-being by preventing health-related diseases. The Program is available to adults age 60 years and older. Priority is given to low-income individuals, racial or ethnic minorities, rural communities, those with limited English proficiency, and/or those at risk of institutionalization.

One of our campaign stops was a community space in the neighborhood of Hegewich. It is located on the far south side of Chicago, known as the perfect workingman’s neighborhood. When Chicago’s steel mills shut down in the 1980s, the Polish immigrants who’d settled in Hegewich lost their jobs. They also lost their pensions. People survived on government subsistence and odd jobs.

As Nancy began her round of shaking hands, bobbing up and down to lean over to hear the messages of the elderly, she announced, “You know, my husband, Ad, voted for Meals-on-Wheels when he was a senator in Washington.”

Before she could get out another word, a large woman in the corner who looked like a George Booth cartoon yelled:

“Yeah? Well, he oughta be here now for the corned beef! ‘Cause it stinks!”

“Well, I’ll be sure to tell Adlai!” Nancy shouted back.

Funding runs out on December 31, 2024 for the Older Americans Act and the Meals on Wheels Program. If Congress doesn’t vote to reauthorize the Act, the Nutrition Program will be at the mercy of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And they have vowed to eliminate all programs that have not been reauthorized by Congress.

My guess is neither of them have come to terms with ageism.