Sharks and Snakes At the Movies

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.

Oppenheimer & Jesus

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.

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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.

The Role Model

When my family finally came apart in the Chicago suburbs, one of my sisters and I were sent to live with relatives in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Two other sisters and my mother settled in with relatives at the Jersey Shore.

Colonized around 1690 by British Catholic royalists, Upper Marlboro became a Southern Maryland river port for tobacco ships. When I arrived in 1959, there was no sign of the native Algonquin tribes who had inhabited the area for 10,000 years, and the Patuxent River was unnavigable. The town had become an agricultural, social, and political hot spot. A mere ten miles from the Washington, D.C. border, Upper Marlboro’s old tobacco farms served as weekend getaways for the political class with free-flowing gin and Saturday morning rides to the hunt.

My family had moved in and out of towns all over the Midwest, but we never lived in the South. And never had I been in a segregated school. This is Harriet Tubman country. In 1850, tobacco planters around Upper Marlboro owned 2,793 enslaved Black people. One hundred and nine years later, Catholic schools and churches were still separated by race. At thirteen, I had no clue how to speak up for injustice. My aunt and uncle acknowledged segregation was wrong but cautioned me to keep my mouth shut. On my first day at St. Mary’s grade school, I asked my teacher why the Black children were in a different building.

Out on the playground, a baseball game formed every day at noon. A boy in my class chose the teams. Who is he? Did the nuns volunteer him to organize the kids? Everyone called him “Rabbit.” I traipsed up to him and asked if I could play. Without blinking, he asked, “What position?”

“I can play anywhere, but I was a pitcher on my softball team.”

“Where’s your mitt?”

“It got lost when we moved.”

“Here. Take this: It’s extra. You can pitch until someone else wants to.”

Again, I wondered who he was. This coach? This commander of respect? This boy in my class? This leader?

When the Black kids came running from their school, they rushed up to Rabbit, and he divided them into our teams.

***St Mary of the Assumption “Colored” School Upper Marlboro, Maryland***

“Henry, you play first base for the B team. Betsy, you be shortstop for the A’s.”

Everyone knew we had only an hour to play; they jumped into action on Rabbit’s direction without hesitation, without whining, antsy to get on that field.

“That’s Regan!” He shouted. “She’s gonna pitch for a while.”

“Play Ball!”

On the way back to our classroom, I asked Rabbit if we were allowed to play with the Black kids.

“Not ‘sposed to,” he said. “But we don’t ask. They know we jus’ wanna play ball.”

Rabbit is the first natural-born leader I remember. In the classroom, he respected others and did his work. He was distant but had friends. I never pitched again because Rabbit rotated others in. He never criticized. He never praised, either.

He just wanted to play ball.

Love and Hate

A member of my writing group recited the following essay the other day. I asked permission to post it here because I was moved by how two different Chicagoans address the current influx of migrants.

Conversation on the Bus

Last week I rode the bus and noticed a migrant family near me. The mom was pregnant, her youngest son was fussing, and her other son, maybe three years old, was playing with the window. The father was looking out the window, and the daughter, about ten years old, was sitting next to me. I don’t usually start a conversation on the bus, but she was asking her parents about a bus and their destination. So I said, “Hi, I’m Annette, do you speak English?”

“A little,” she said.

“Where are you going? Could I be of help?”

She looked down and said, “I’m not sure.”

We were quiet, and then I said, “I’m going to my church to a class. Do you go to school?”

She shook her head and said, “We’re new to Chicago.”

“Oh, welcome. Where are you from?”

“We are from Venezuela.”

“I hear your country is beautiful. Nice and warm.”

“Yes, but I miss my grandmother.”

“Of course,” I said. “Your English is quite good.”

“Thank you,” she said. “My dad helps me.” I smiled at him. He smiled back.

Looking at him, I added, “My church supplies clothing and food to immigrants. It opens at nine on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I’m going there now. “

As we neared my stop I said, “I wish you the very best. I’m getting off at this stop.”

I bundled up and walked along thinking these were gentle people who needed help and hadn’t done anything wrong. I wish everyone had a better understanding of their plight.

People’s problems need a “face” because the mindset changes once you become engaged in conversation with them. I believe most people would want to help, but the housing issue is so severe. I don’t know how to begin to solve the not-in-my-neighborhood problem.

I went to morning prayers and mentioned this encounter to the group and one of them said. “We need to help our homeless first; after all, they are Americans.”

I bit my tongue and simply asked the group to pray for the migrant situation.

Afterward, I talked with my friend Carol. She said, “It’s a complex problem. We desperately need more workers and they’re hard workers.”

“This is a classic social work problem,” I said. “The people on the lowest rung of Maslov’s triangle are fighting for limited resources, and the “scarcity” principle is at work.

The United States has great abundance. Congress has done nothing about immigration for twenty-five years. The situation in South America, with no democracy and lawlessness, makes this a five times bigger problem than it was. People want to escape. I certainly would leave my country if my life and my family’s lives were in danger.

A. Baco 1/18/2024

John Clum on May December

It’s awards season. The many movies and streaming shows I won’t (can’t!) watch are mounting up: weird sci-fi and fantasy, monsters and invasions, explicit sex, and chopped up bodies found on riverbanks. John Clum watches and writes about these for me. His writing is more entertaining than the shows. I give you another Clum review. Bravo John!

MAY DECEMBER

Review of “Maestro” from Guest Blogger John Clum

MAESTRO: Bradley Cooper’s CITIZEN KANE

Killing the January Blues

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 Chicago distributing 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?”

Here’s to honoring the legacy. Happy New Year.

Forsaken Christmas

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 the Neighborhood. 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.

I’ll wait for Netflix.

Cold Wars

The 2019 Polar Vortex slid down from the North Pole, threatening to lock Chicago into subzero stillness. I prepared for the warring cold by teeing up the entire 18-hour series of The Marvelous Mrs. Mazel. Then I threw stale bread crumbs onto my balcony to nourish the house sparrows, finches, and chickadees before they huddled together in eaves and cracked soffits to wait it out. I shuttered in and Dapped all the little crevices around the balcony door that were spritzing air into my not-so-insulated living room. That was the extent of my preparation for the coldest two days ever recorded in Chicago.

Day one brought minus 23 degrees. I woke to a thick film of silver ice covering all the windows. The ice curtain obscured the humanity moving around behind the windows across the street and any fool pedestrian walking in the feels-like-minus 40.

My binge-watching was interrupted mid-morning by a thrashing whomp, whomp whomp on the concealed balcony. I inched toward a clearing in the frosty glass.

A murder of crows had come to forage.

The much-studied American Black Crow might be the most intelligent animal other than primates. They hide their food and come back for it. If a crow looks you in the eye, she will remember you, follow you down the street, and caw at you for attention like a wild pet.

On day two, the temperature was 21 degrees below. The ice wall on my windows melted enough for a small lookout. I abandoned Mrs. Mazel and placed a chair well away from the clearing to observe the crows without startling them. They first landed in late morning. A mighty set of black wings fluttered a plumped-up body onto the balcony railing, and the rest followed—a family of five dipping to the balcony floor for leftovers. They flew off and came back. Again. And again. And again. I remained still throughout, trying to lock eyes with the birds. In the afternoon, the weather broke and allowed the dog and me to walk outside—under the watchful eyes of noisy new friends.

The first cold days of 2023 were predicted for the weekend after Thanksgiving. Though nowhere near the 2019 plunge, 30-degree temperatures heightened awareness of asylum-seeking families living on cardboard slabs outside police stations. I sought diversion through another favorite TV series, Julia.

The TV automatically tuned in CNN, though, where there was live coverage of the hostages being released from Gaza. A mysterious and curious need for every scrap of information gripped me. Who are they? What are their stories? Where are they going? I saw six women over the age of 70. One 85-year-old was helped onto a bus. I winced, feeling my own arthritic pain. Four children appeared—ages 2, 4, 5, and 9. I squinted to see if they were clutching teddy bears.

After watching for two tearful days, unrelenting shivers overcame me. And when I took the dog for a walk, that murder of crows cawed to us from the barren trees.

Near Miss

Some years ago, Cappi Quigley fetched me at the Nashville Airport to spend Thanksgiving weekend with her daughters and their families. She wore black to offset one of her imaginative, color-drenched, wow necklaces.

“Before we go to the house, we must stop at an art gallery downtown,” she said.

That was Cappi. She loved sharing our mutual folk art obsession.

Cappi was visiting me in Chicago when feminist artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s whimsical, large-scale kaleidoscope animals, monsters, and figures were exhibited outside the Garfield Park Conservatory. She made her way to the west side on her own to see “the Niki.” And then couldn’t wait to take me there on the green line.

**Cappi Quigley, 2011, at Queen Califia’s Magical Circle, Escondido, CA**

We had similar tastes in most everything. Whenever I visited her in California, we ate from the ripened fields around San Luis Obispo. On one visit, we dined for a week on nothing but fresh-picked strawberries and avocadoes.

Cappi hurried me through the large, tantalizing rooms at the Nashville Arts Company to the attached warehouse in the back. The floor and walls were full of metal sculptures of every size and dimension. Each one painted in rainbow colors. There were playful metal masks with flowers springing off their hats, some waving flags, some with large eyeglasses, and some holding birds. One wall was filled with life-size avant-garde metal guitars. On the floor, an arrangement of Picasso-type chairs sat around a mesmerizing metal table.

The Arts Company in Nashville represented Brother Mel Meyer, a Marionist monk from St. Louis. Some of each of his creations were on display: metal sculptures, watercolors, stained glass, acrylic on canvas, handmade paper, and textiles. I cherish my Brother Mel metal wall sculpture of a woman with big red glasses, which I bought on the spot. Cappi and I bonded anew over our love and awe for Brother Mel. She subsequently visited his gallery and workshop in St. Louis. Brother Mel was well represented in her Central Coast home.

*Brother Mel Meyer, St. Louis 20th Century*

We got on the road in a state of hyperconsciousness. Tennessee red maples and golden ginkgoes illumined our spirits. Fireplace pine spritzed the air. Aware of the weekend schedule, we quickened our pace down West End Avenue. Out of nowhere and without warning, an ancient oak tree silently uprooted, toppled over, and bounced down, laying itself out across the road in front of us. The front of the car rested in leafy branches.

I’m not sure how many times we screamed, ‘Oh my god,’ or when we stopped shaking. Without words, we exchanged seats. I backed up, turned around, and drove home. Throughout the weekend, we failed to get an attentive audience for the story of our near miss. Only Cappi and I could know we’d been spirited into a new dimension of living.

Niki de Saint Phalle died in 2002, around the time Cappi and I swooned over her work. We mourned for Brother Mel Meyer in 2013. Cappi Quigley joined them in September 2023. They all left us their own technicolor visions of Paradise.

How lucky we are.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon