Soul Clawing Days

Anne Lamott, a popular soul-searching memoirist, live-Zoomed a teaching on writing recently. She emphasized two major points: 1) stop not writing, and; 2) no one cares if you’re writing, especially your family and friends. Anne told us to be likable narrators, never vengeful and don’t antagonize the reader.

I risk being an “un”likable antagonistic narrator in writing about the looting and violence in my downtown Chicago neighborhood, the Gold Coast. An amalgam of landscaped mansions, row houses and mixed income highrises, the Gold Coast rose in the wake of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. Wealthy industrialists built North Lake Shore Drive to front their new mansions. In the late 1980s, the Gold Coast was the second most affluent neighborhood in the United States, behind Manhattan’s Upper East Side.I’m neither affluent nor near-affluent. I live in the Gold Coast to be safe.

In the early morning of May 31, I walked out the back door of my building to Oak Street with Henry the dog. Oak Street is a block-long high-fashion retail museum where the haute couture show off their latest trendsetting wardrobes in oversize clear glass windows. The Chicago uprising stemming from the George Floyd murder turned Oak Street into a comic book version of a visit from Godzilla. Within hours shattered glass lay strewn on the streets and sidewalks, dismembered mannequins lay naked on the curbs, paper and cardboard boxes lay shredded everywhere. A U-Haul truck perched on the curbside by the shattered window of Dolce & Gabbana. Scavengers foraged through smashed-in Armani’s looking for remnants of the organized looting that had just ended. The street recovered somewhat over the next few months and then bam! On August 10 Godzilla came through again and not only sacked Oak Street, but unloosed a reign of violence and looting all over Chicago’s retail corridors.

Black Lives Matter, a radical national organization became a mainstream darling after the gruesome George Floyd murder. Yes, white people said, we finally get it! We value Black people and their right to self-determination. We want to fight for equitable systems too. We might even support reparations. We’ll try to understand what you mean by “defund the police.” We pledge to learn more about white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Ending criminalization of Black communities is our goal too. We’re with you.

A BLM spokesperson stood in front of the police station that held 100 arrestees from the August 10 uprising and announced that BLM considers looting “reparations”, and that downtown attacks will continue until there’s justice and equality in their neighborhoods.

Activist Michael Pfleger appeared hangdog on TV mouthing a familiar plea including words like, “decades of disinvestment and abandonment,” and begging city leaders for a strategy.

“I’ve never seen things worse.” He said.

In 1968 I had an autographed copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice”. I have no idea what drew me to anti-racism then or what draws me to it now. But I sure do feel as defeated as Father Pfleger sounds.

And I miss walking Henry through the Oak Street fashion museum.

Is Zoom a Reliable Alibi?

One of the joys of the Shutdown has been discovering crime dramas on what used to be mysterious and unclicked words on my TV screen. The series of murder mysteries on MHZ, Hulu, Britbox and Acorn are not necessarily formulaic, but they have one major scene in common: the detective always asks if the suspect was elsewhere on the night of; and if there are witnesses to the alibi.

I had an alibi last Sunday. The Shutdown service at my church was livestreamed into an adequate eleven-inch computer screen propped up on the desk in my bedroom. The sermon struck the taut chords in my silent mouth and unclapped hands. I needed a collection of witnesses to shout “Amen!” to Pastor Shannon’s sermon. But I was alone, looking out the elsewhere window weeping over the no-one. No one to join in a standing ovation, no one to see and no one to see me.

After the sermon I sang along with the tinny music emanating from the computer; an old hymn I love:

Live into hope of captives freed

From chains of fear or want or greed.

God now proclaims our full release

To faith and hope and joy and peace.

Halfway through I shuttered with a renewed and deeper knowing that I’d never attend a church service in person again. The pandemic Shutdown will hold me captive in chains of fear until the end of my days. Groups, especially singing groups are out of the question for my old bones in these non-vaccine days.

I won’t observe Pastor Matt’s infant grow from a toddler to a Sunday schooler. He’ll never again see me ooh and ahh in the delight of his fatherhood. I’ll never sneak into an early morning service in my pajamas (hidden under a long winter coat), to hear Pastor Rocky again. And he’ll never see me admiring him in the way of a proud mother. Gabrielle and I will never again join arms, run up to Pastor Shannon after the service and proclaim our undying gratitude for her ministry. And she will never see the reflected glow of our admiring faces in the pews.

Albert Einstein once posed a question to a fellow physicist, “Do you really believe that the moon only exists if you look at it?” It’s a common philosophical question, similar to
the sophomoric, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”. In morning meditation I intentionally ask myself if I’m hearing sound or “thoughts of sound” as a way to go deeper, where there is no sound.

Intentional solitude is not the same however as the feelings of isolation that arise from the existential supposing, “If I’m neither heard nor seen, do I exist?” Responding to covid requires an abrupt “so long” to a group existence I wasn’t ready to leave. In an alternate elsewhere life, witnesses see and hear me on Zoom.

Is this a reliable alibi?

You Went to Woodstock?

There’s not been an event in my life that’s made me feel more like a hot shit than going to Woodstock.

On August 15,1969, everyone I knew in my small circle of dope smoking friends were either headed there, planning to meet there or trying to get there. Hundreds of miles of caravans disrupted the pastoral dairy farms of lower New York state, rolling upcountry from the Jersey Shore. Reveling to the world’s greatest rock and roll bands melded our bodies and souls to three days of peace and love.

Throughout the festival Wavy Gravy danced to the microphone with updates on the number of cool cats sitting on the hillside of Max Yasgur’s farm. When he exclaimed half-a-million, whoops and whistles rose up to the spirit in the sky. All the hippies in America, maybe the world, had come together. I was right where I was supposed to be.

My friends and I told and retold Woodstock tales for a time afterwards. And then it was over. Or so it seemed.

Eight years later as I stirred spaghetti sauce in my Sandburg Village kitchen in Chicago, my ten-year old son and his friends were snickering in the doorway.

“Go ahead. Ask her.” My son elbowed his friend.

“Did you really go to Woodstock?” He asked.

“Yes, I did.”

“See, I told you.”

“Wow. What was it like?”

I brought out a small box of photos and souvenirs including my prized ticket to Woodstock to show the unbelievers. Until that point I’d kept Woodstock quiet. No one in my new crowd of straight and sober friends was or ever had been a hippie. Woodstock wasn’t yet a badge of honor, rather the confession of a derelict life.

But after wowing those ten-year old boys, I knew I was on to something.

In 1969, half a million was only .2% of the population. By 1979 we were an elite group, only 500,000 of us. In 1994 I interviewed for a twenty-fifth anniversary story in a local Chicago paper. The Presbyterian church showed Woodstock the movie and asked me to give a talk about my experience.

My ten year old grandson called one day in 2007 and asked, “Regan, my dad said you went to Woodstock. Is that true?” I assured him it was.

“We just watched the movie. It looks pretty wild.”

That box of souvenirs mysteriously disappeared after I showed it to his father’s pals at the same age. My grandson didn’t need proof to tell his friends though. Unbelievable reality turns believable with age. He asked about my favorite Woodstock band. The next Christmas he gave me a complete set of Janis Joplin.

Using “Woodstock” in the description of my upcoming book on Amazon optimizes search engine results. Even in my seventies friends introduce me as “…she went to Woodstock.” What are they implying? Drugs? Hippie? ‘60s radical? Or simply that I used to be a hot shit badass.

It Will Always Be The Sears Tower

In my twenties I had three different last names. One maiden name and two different married names, to be exact. Changing my name when I married wasn’t mandatory, but doing so made it easier to cash a check or use a charge card: women weren’t able to obtain credit cards separate from their husbands until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974. I had to show an I.D. to do either.

Neither married name lasted long enough for anyone to notice, including me. The surnames were easy to change and change back. Every once in a while one of the defunct names shows up in a credit report.

Just as my own name change had little effect on me, neither does changing landmark names like the Sears Tower to the Willis Tower. I and everyone I know still calls it the Sears Tower. We all have our particular reasons, from memorable tours of the ninety-ninth floor observation deck to family conversations about our hometown having the tallest building in the world, which it was for twenty-five years.

Driving back into Chicago after a sixteen year hiatus I had my driver’s license with my newly-reclaimed maiden name tucked close in a jeans pocket. My nine-year old son spotted the Sears Tower from miles away and breathed, “We’re home.” A few years later, we rode our bikes down Franklin Street to watch helicopters maneuver TV towers in place on the 110th story rooftop. Whenever out-of-towners visited us we couldn’t wait to take them to the top of the Sears Tower. Now my son shows it off to his own children, their friends and their own out-of-town guests.

OIP.7Wn5-vbqH2H6HgpjGLOGrwHaLM People often ask why it’s called the Sears Tower since no tools or washing machines are sold inside. I shrug my shoulders. The well-reported troubles of the Sears Tower are too exhausting to recount. Even as the doors opened in 1973, Sears Roebuck & Co., had slipped in its ranking as the largest retailer in the world. Lawsuits beset the half-built tower trying to limit its height so it wouldn’t block television signals. The news has continually reported the building’s bankruptcies, miles of vacancies and its lost status as the world’s tallest building.

On September 11, 2001 terrorists flew planes into New York’s World Trade Center, and the Sears Tower instantly became Chicago’s “ground zero”. I worked a few blocks away and when we evacuated that morning, I mindlessly shuffled along Jackson Street past workers furiously cordoning off a wide swath around it. For years afterward, few went inside the building fearing it would get attacked. Scores of business offices moved out leaving whole floors deserted.

In May, 2020, my TV blanked out after the Chicago River rose and flooded three Sears Tower sub basements, knocking out electricity to those TV towers. I’m rarely in the vicinity these days, but it appears everyday within my roving city view, anchoring my heart, that Sears Tower.

Suddenly Adult

In grade school I suspected most little girls in my class didn’t hide under their beds at night afraid a drunken parent would yank them awake for no reason.

Actually there were reasons. My mother would rock my sleep-deprived body and warble declarations of love for my father. Stories spewed through her scotch-soaked breath about their college days, and how she missed him, even when he’d be gone for months leaving us with no money. I never knew what to say to her. This love stilled words of comfort.

My father had reasons too. He’d turn on all the lights, crash into the bedroom like a defensive end screaming, “where’s your mother?” Sometimes she huddled under the bed with me. Sometimes she hid in the closet.

I trusted my parents knew what they were doing. My mother taught me to lie to creditors on the phone and steal groceries for the family, sins to the Catholic school nuns. Lying and stealing were secret family virtues, no worse than my imitating her back-slanted handwriting, which the nuns proclaimed a sin of rebellion. Getting these secret EDB4E413-7562-45A6-80E9-337258CF464C_4_5005_c family virtues right forestalled soul-crushing parental recriminations.

My sisters and I never talked about the night terrors, the midnight moves, previous friends, schools or neighborhoods. Each time we were evicted I knew we’d never see our classmates again. There was no virtue in displaying the feelings evoked from such abrupt separations. Talking about the past violated some adult moral code beyond my understanding.

Scrunched up in the back seat with my sisters on the road to a new town, I overheard my father tell my mother more than once, “this will be the last move, this school the best, this house the snazziest.” I believed him. My mother did too.

Until she didn’t.

While my father was off on another prolonged toot, Agnes jerked us from our Midwestern roots and moved us to the East Coast. My sister Gael and I moved in with Aunt Joanne, Uncle Bill and their seven children in southern Maryland.

My eighth grade class at St. Mary’s of the Assumption had memorized one poem each month that school year, and in order to graduate, I had one month to memorize all nine poems. Not only did I rebel against this arbitrary standard, I became hysterical over it. But who could I talk to? Agnes had taken my other two sisters to New Jersey to live with another relative. For the first time in my life I absolutely knew she had gotten it wrong. I needed her with me, to defend me against the injustice of those nuns. I had sacrificed a lot for her, and it was time she helped me. My pleadings on the phone did nothing to bring her back to intercede.

Every night after dinner Uncle Bill taught me the meaning of the poems so I’d easily remember their words, O Captain! My Captain!, Annabel Lee, The Tyger, The Chambered Nautilus. This love sang out words of comfort.

I never trusted my mother again.

Soft Serve Summer

One teenage summer I was hired to sell soft-serve ice cream on the corner of Eighteenth and Main in South Belmar, New Jersey. I opened the stand in mid-morning and closed my shift at four. I had just enough time to get home, shower off the sugary goo and get to my other job counting out cash drawers at a popular saloon on the beach. The legal age for working at the bar was twenty-one. I was eighteen.

On the east coast the common name for soft serve was carvel after the brand that invented it. Learning to dish it up was the easiest gig to master. I started the day pouring gallons of ice cream mixture into the top of a big aluminum tank, replenished the cones, cups and toppings and waited to pull the lever of creamy goodness for the crowd.

Most summer businesses wisely set up on the boardwalk or Ocean Avenue where the action is. The carvel stand opened a mile and a half from the beachfront as a gamble, a beacon of delight beckoning vacationing families. George the owner gambled himself a bit at Monmouth Park Racetrack during the day and at all-night card games. In the 1960s the Jersey Shore had its share of mobsters conducting illegal poker games in summer cottages up and down the Atlantic coast.

I spent a lot of time perched on a stool reading books and magazines that summer. Very few customers came for carvel during the day. The crowds were seaside, swimming, surfing and sunning. A little boy popped up and down at the window one day. I heard him giggling under the ledge where I couldn’t see him.

“I think I hear someone,” I said out loud, “I wonder if I should make a chocolate or vanilla cone.”

“Chocolate!” Came the response loud and clear.

I held the cone out the window without saying a word. A head full of tight black curls slowy pulled up the thin shirtless brown body of Perry. He reached his hand out for the cone.

“Twenty-five cents please.” I said.

“Don’t have no money,” said Perry. “It’s already made so jus’ gimme it.”

I tried to tell him I couldn’t do that but his persuasive smile matched his logical entreaty. I cautioned him not to tell anyone. He did tell someone, of course—all his friends. One by one they appeared below the window in the same way Perry did, as if bobbing up and Unknown 2 down was the normal way to get a free cone.

At one point George told me the reason we didn’t have customers was because too many Black kids were hanging around. We both knew that wasn’t true. He loved those funny bobbers as much as I did but that’s what he told his white friends and family to justify his failure.

Between George’s lifting cash from the till and my give-aways to Perry and his friends the post Labor Day accounting showed two thousand dollars in the red.

George, curiously unconcerned, laid plans for his next scheme.

Mammy Minnie

Her name was Minnie. At least that’s what we called her. When I read Kathryn Stockett’s novel, “The Help,” I was surprised that Stockett named one of her household maids Minny. Perhaps Minnie is a mid-century modern name for black women who cared for white children, similar to Mammy in “Gone with the Wind”, one of the most iconic racist caricatures of black women ever created.

White families wouldn’t have consciously known how demeaning it was to replace a black woman’s given name with a generic. Nor would they have cared.

My family’s long-gone photo collection had a picture of Minnie surrounded by my toddler sisters and me. We were all born a year apart beginning in 1945 in post-war Annapolis. All the Navy officers had black help to clean, cook and iron for their families. When we moved to Washington, D.C. Minnie came with us. I don’t know if she ever lived with us but I do know she had her own family.

Her dark skin captivated me. I desperately wanted to touch her face, but feared her blackness would rub off, as if it were like the watercolors in my little tin paintbox. I’ve coveted curly hair my whole life, a direct result of knowing and wanting to be like Minnie. She smelled as fresh as her starched dresses and aprons. In contrast, my parents and their friends had an unrelenting stench of cigarettes and beer.

Minnie was older than my mother. She may have been a grandmother, though I only knew the notion of age from my parents. My grandmothers were dead and I have no early memory of my grandfathers, nor any other old person.

My mother, Agnes, allowed my sisters and me to spend our own separate weekends at Minnie’s house. I don’t know whose idea this was. Surely no black woman would have volunteered to be responsible for the welfare and safety of a white child for a weekend. I like the idea of my mother introducing us to life in a black household, to expand our horizons, as it were. An unconventional mother, Agnes could have sent us off to the projects in southeast Washington just to shock the neighborhood swells. Then again, maybe all white parents foisted their youngsters onto the family lives of their maids.

Minnie had a white two-story new house full of people, food and laughs. The little girls around her home taught me to hopscotch. I played that game the rest of my childhood on the sidewalks of all the myriad towns my family moved in and out of. For years after, the words “projects” and “southeast Washington” evoked a neighborly feeling full of kindness and fun. I was safe there. Even now, with all the negative information packed inside my head about “the projects”, my thoughts are pierced by a loving instant, Minnie.

I never heard Minnie’s name again after we’d been evicted from our house in Washington. I hope she missed me.

Shutdown Week 13: Haircuts

Chicago yawned its way out of its zoom sleep last week. Mayor Lightfoot cautiously moved the city through Phase Three of the reopening. The elated citizenry, with and without masks, piled up outdoors in restaurants, parks, sidewalks and in the streets. Nothing surprised me more than all the haircuts donned by my semi-quarantined zoom friends and dog-walking neighbors. Everytime I asked, “did you get a haircut?” I felt like I was accusing the person of a crime. And in turn, people responded defensively.

“I drove up to my hairdresser’s apartment,” one friend said, “but he wouldn’t cut my hair because my temperature was 100.”

“Your hairdresser took your temperature?”

Going to the barber or hairdresser with its face-to-face closeness has been cited as high risk for covid-19 exposure by some epidemiologists. But if barbers are taking temperatures, wearing masks and sanitizing the chair we plunk ourselves in, what’s the harm?

Surprise sightings on zoom chats accompanied by empty shutdown calendars have prompted much-needed connection to distant friends and those nearby I’ve not talked to in ages. At a newly reopened outdoor restaurant, I met a friend I’d not seen since she married, moved to the suburbs and had babies.

“Your hair is so long!” she said.

“I know. I’m not quite ready to go for a haircut. But when I do, it will be a short one.”

“Oh no, don’t get karen hair.” main-qimg-cdca39eb3f778d4a6a38d2b1d8596519

“Karen hair?”

She went on to tell me karen hair is a bob, cut shorter in the back with long straight sides.

“Karen is slang for an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman,” she said.

She plunged into Instagram on her iPhone to show me a Karens Go Wild site. A list of witnesses rolled by with photos and descriptions of “karens” asking to speak to the manager, which is a major part of the karen mien. Apparently karens complain about waitstaff or retail clerks as a matter of course. They often demand the firing of an employee for inconveniencing them. Some of the posts:

karen gives raisins to kids on Halloween

drives an SUV to carpool her kids to soccer practice… better hope the ref doesn’t make a wrong call because she will sue!

“oh my god Karen do you really have to talk to the Burger King manager every time they forget to give you a ketchup packet.“

You Tube has an array of karen videos titled, Karen Meltdown Compilation, Karen Armageddon, Karen Apocalypse, Karen Freakout and Top 5 Karens Getting Triggered. I must admit a few video anecdotes remind me of some of my most obnoxious moments. Like the time I refused any explanation from the building manager on incorrect charges added to my monthly condo fee. “Just fix it!” I growled as I careened out of the office.

Karen, a lovely name bestowed on some of my loveliest friends, is draped with this memed-out behavioral style because it’s so white, according to the Slang Dictionary.

I really need a haircut. But I’ll avoid the karen until throwing shade on her passes.

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.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Category: Writers