Is That a Rat?

Summer 2025 came to its 80 degree sunny end on September 22 at 1:19 pm. The autumnal equinox. About that time, the gardener at a building near Whole Foods was exchanging old for new in sidewalk planters. The red summer geraniums and green ferns were dug up, tossed out and replaced with lavender chrysanthemums and those curious purple cabbages. A potted plant gardener myself, I was glued to the gardener’s performance as I walked slowly by with Elsa. Two robust rats promptly jumped out of a planter onto the sidewalk so close I think they grazed my shoes (ew!) before scurrying off. Elsa’s rat-catcher terrier pedigree neglected to alert us. She was unfazed, didn’t flinch. Me? I screamed bloody murder. The gardener laughed. I suppose gardeners meet rats in the city all the time.

Later in the day, on our evening walk, I almost stepped on a DEAD RAT in the park, throwing terror into my dog-walking daydream.

Dear god, what is going on? A rat epidemic? Do rats still carry the plague? Rabies? Do we have vaccines for them? Trump would say don’t get those shots. Drink bleach. Take Intermectin. Isn’t that for parasites in pigs?

Oh, not again. Can’t I have just a few peaceful moments at the end of summer without that guy slamming into my thinking?

Back in a voluntary meditative state to help ward off evil thoughts, I sat on a bench keeping vigil over the DEAD RAT to warn other dog owners.

“Hey, yoo-hoo!” I shouted.

“Yes?”

“Watch out for the DEAD RAT over there by the hydrangeas!”

Ralph the dog was off his leash and just about ready to get a noseful of DEAD RAT. Ralph is a frisky German Shepherd with his senses still in tact. He smells a DEAD RAT a mile away. His grateful owner waved at me as he hurried over to pull Ralph away from the DEAD RAT.

Elsa, still unfazed, never uses her senses. She pretends her sniffer doesn’t work so she doesn’t have to chase squirrels. Her ears perk up when her name is mentioned but no other sound seems to register. And her eyes? Who knows what comes through those cloudy old pupils. Since she’ll eat anything, it’s dubious whether or not she still has a sense of taste. She had no sense of the nearby DEAD RAT.

But spatial awareness? Elsa has that in spades. She always knows where her little white body is in relationship to me. She is by my side, unleashed, whether we’re walking along a garden path or in wide open spaces.

In other words, she’s the perfect dog.

As long as she doesn’t cozy up to a DEAD RAT.

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.

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.

Schadenfreude Radio

The radio. How I love the radio!

Transistor radios first appeared on the shelf behind the cashier at Walgreen’s, alongside the cigarettes, in the 1950s. The purchase price was cheap enough for my mother. I can’t imagine what my life would have been had it not been for the radio.

In our teens, we lay on the floor, smoking pot and singing to the Beatles on the radio. A friend once mused, “our lives would be more manageable if it weren’t for the radio.” Every half hour DJs stopped spinning records and announced the news. Radio news. It stirred me up for life.

The radio these days is an Amazon Echo. It is set to turn on NPR at 7:00 am in my house these days. On Sundays, I usually ignore a 7:00 am show called Hidden Brain. A neuroscientist interviews interesting enough people, but I just want to hear the news at 8. Recently I put off walking the dog and making coffee when I heard the voice of Dr. James Pennebaker on Hidden Brain. He talked about how people’s language, written and vocal, signals what’s happening inside their heads.

James Pennebaker is a social psychologist at the University of Texas-Austin. He taught me that chronic pain can be healed through expressive writing. His recipe, grounded in scientific research, consists of writing it down. Just write it down. It’s cheap, easy. And it works. My writing teacher Beth Finke and I used to call it bibliotherapy. Pennebaker’s books are sweet old friends. The same goes for Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, John Sarno’s Healing Back Pain, and Howard Schubiner’s Unlearn Your Pain. Thinking of these now butters my memory with gratitude. I write because these authors taught me words can heal. And, for the most part, they have.

I’m not particularly interested in interpreting the language of my friends. I don’t want to know what’s happening in their noggins as Pennebaker does with his research subjects. No, what’s tasty lately about Pennebaker is what he says about Donald Trump.

He examined Trump interviews from 2015 to 2024 and found a whopping 44% increase in words plated in the past. What’s that mean? Well, usually presidential candidates dish out rhetoric about the future. Pennebaker says Trump whips up such simple words and sentences that he can only be described as “an incredibly simplistic thinker.”

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

I loved hearing this. And there I was again, glomming on to any tidbit that humiliates and demeans Trump. It’s called schadenfreude. I love that word but ashamed how I delight in its meaning: the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another.”

Schadenfreude is one of the delicious habits I metabolized, after using Pennebaker’s and others’ writing exercises to relieve chronic pain. Obviously this is not a vice easily kept at bay. Availing myself of some form of spirituality, like meditation, helps. And the writing, of course.

But for now, it’s back to the radio.

Happy Birthday Hellraiser

The long call of a spring robin woke me from a dream about Mother Jones. She was organizing my group to protest the nightmarish abolition of women’s rights, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

“I don’t march anymore. I can’t run!” I muttered in half-sleep.

I tugged to escape her visitation as I was tugging the covers to get up and contemplate the robin’s daybreak anthem. The common backyard robin is unusual along the Lake Michigan shoreline where I live. Its song is one of the few teachings I remember from my own mother.

I’d been to a Mother Jones birthday party at the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones, born in County Cork in 1837, immigrated when she was ten years old. Her husband and four children all died of yellow fever in 1867. Four years later her dress-making shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Undaunted, this fierce, five-foot-tall Irish American became an organizer for workers’ rights, particularly the United Mine Workers.

On May 1, 1886, there was a general strike for the eight-hour workday which led to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Mary Harris Jones declared her birth date as May 1, to honor the Haymarket Martyrs. Her exact birthday is unknown. Most records of peasants born in western and southern Ireland were lost or destroyed during the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1852). This is true of my own ancestry.

Mother Jones helped coordinate major strikes in the coal mines and on the railroads where my great-grandfather and great-uncles worked. Her protest marches included children who wore banners saying, “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.” They could easily have been my relatives.

Women activists belittled her lack of commitment to women’s suffrage. She said “you don’t need the vote to raise hell!” Jones believed it was more important to advocate for the working class—black, white, men, women and children—than to support women’s causes alone.

Like Mother Jones’ family, my father’s forebearers were discriminated against due to their immigrant status, their Catholic faith, and their Irish heritage. The shame of the Irish hung heavy in their Kentucky and Indiana homes. But still, my father, fresh out of law school in the late 1930s, working for the United Mine Workers, wrote the first union pension legislation in the United States. And, family lore supposes his father, my grandfather, was a union organizer on the railroad.

When Mary Harris Jones turned 60, she began calling herself “Mother” Jones. She dressed in matronly black, wore old-fashioned hats and referred to the laborers she helped as “her boys.”

When I was 60, I took up offense for workers in my office. Wage inequality, discordant work assignments, and unfair discipline reeked of cruelty. In the end, I got canned, but their jobs were secured.

Like the robin wake-up call at dawn, Mother Jones calls from the graveyard and wakes me to the oppressed and wronged.

I bow to her. In gratitude.

Happy Birthday Mother Jones.

Jews

Jesus, my lifelong friend, accompanied me through chicken pox, mumps, and measles when quarantine isolated me from my sisters, parents, and friends. No, I didn’t have Mother Theresa-like visions. He was more of an imaginary friend for my waxing brain, like an animated Pooh Bear. Clergy at St. Mary’s school in Terre Haute, Indiana, taught that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem. Due to those back-to-back pre-vaccine childhood illnesses, I heard these Jesus facts my second time around in the first grade. The teaching doubled down in my malleable brain, which had grown to ninety-five percent of its total capacity, normal for a six-year-old.

There was never any question that Jesus was born of Jewish parents. Israel, presented as a holy place, not a political state, was sacred ground because that’s where Jesus lived. There was always the implication that we, as Catholics, were in Jesus’s family, that somehow we had Jewish roots. If Jews believed in Jesus, they got to go to heaven, like us Catholics. But no other religion. Such was my Roman Catholic schooling.

Our single black-and-white family television transmitted few programs into our living room in the 1950s. Roy Rogers and I Love Lucy were allowed, but my parents insisted we watch the nightly news. My sisters and I didn’t dare whine for fear of verbal reprisals like, “Shut up and listen—maybe you’ll learn something.”

They’d let us watch “This is Your Life,” a forerunner to PBS’ “Finding Your Roots’. In 1953, This is Your Life broadcasted the story of 32-year-old Hanna Bloch-Kohner, a Holocaust survivor. I wasn’t much interested in the not-so-famous Hanna, but I did wonder about the Holocaust.

When I was ten years old, as my brain power peaked, local TV stations advertised the opening of Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie, Illinois. We lived in Wilmette, on the border of Skokie.

“Where’s Skokie?” I asked my mother.

“That’s where all the Jews live.” She answered.

All my thoughts screeched to a halt. I’d never seen a Jew. I assumed that whatever Jews were leftover from the time of Jesus surely had died in that mysterious “Holocaust,” a word adults uttered in a hush. Of course, I couldn’t ask my mother what Jews were doing in Skokie. She expected me to know what she knew, no matter the subject. She would have ridiculed me with a sarcastic, “You’re kidding me. Don’t you watch the news?”

From that moment on, I looked for Jews in supermarkets, at the beach, in the record store, and even at school. It’s possible I looked for men who resembled Jesus. In high school, I met a Jewish brother and sister. I stared them into my spiritual family. I wondered how they got to New Jersey from Bethlehem or Jerusalem or Israel, those holy places whose ancient remnants had settled in my bones, with Jesus.

My brain, now waning, has reformed itself through evidence, facts, and logic into knowing and loving the Jewish story. There may be evidence, and there may be facts, but there’s no logic to knowing Jesus.

That’s still a belief.

Stop Making Sense

WBEZ Chicago is celebrating 40 years of one of the greatest concert films of all time, Stop Making Sense, at the Studebaker Theater in downtown Chicago’s Fine Arts Building.

I love this movie. Every Sunday when my son was a toddler, he’d nap as his father studied, and I’d go to the movies. When he was old enough, we went to the movies together, especially on Christmas Day after the divorces, and it was just the two of us. At seventeen, he convinced me to see the Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense at the same Studebaker Theater.

“I don’t like punk rock,” I said.

“It’s not punk. It’s different. You’ll like it,” he convinced me.

He had his own band at the time and knew his music, so I trusted him. He was right. I blasted the Stop Making Sense cassette on my car radio until the tape wore out.

The film documents the legendary rock band Talking Heads performing at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December 1983. David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison perform alongside an ecstatic ensemble of supporting musicians.

When my movie buddy Marca Bristo was alive, we went to the movies nearly every Saturday. We’d mull the pros and cons of what we had just seen in the quiet theater afterward before going off to a coffee shop to talk about politics. Marca died in September 2019. The releases that year included Little Women, 1917, and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Part of mourning Marca meant slacking off on movie-going. I saw only one movie for the rest of the year, Just Mercy, which tells the true story of defense attorney Bryan Stevenson and his client, a black man falsely accused of murder. It was my quiet tribute to Marca, a powerful advocate for disability rights.

These days, I’m wary of catching Covid and all manner of infectious diseases so I’ve been in only one movie theater since March 2020 to see Caste.

But I may have to venture into the old Studebaker theater with its high ceiling and wide aisles to see this old film with old friends who love the old Talking Heads. There’s just nothing like being in a room full of people who love what you love.

________________________

Stop Making Sense Tickets

Where Babies Come From

A pamphlet in the back of the church had all the details. The Catholic Marriage Manual. The title revealed nothing to me about the contents. But the sixth-grade boys knew. At recess, the girls followed them into the church from the playground. I was new and needed to fit in. One of the girls grabbed the booklet, and we all ran out to sit under the shady elm at the edge of the parking lot. She read from the booklet, “the man places his penis inside the woman’s vagina” to make a baby. “Eww!” The girls squealed. And those boys, standing by the corner of the church, pointed at us and laughed.

To look cool, I desperately wanted to act like I already knew that. But I was so shocked I couldn’t control my facial expressions, and my shaking knees gave way. I could hardly stand up.

I act the same way when I come to some new awareness these days. I blurt out, “What? How come I didn’t know that?”

A boy I wanted to impress once told me Paul McCartney recorded a very high whistle sound in the song “A Day in the Life” so that his pet dog could hear it.

“I knew that,” I said, hoping he was telling the truth and not testing me. Inside my head, I heard, “What? I didn’t know that!”

Being cool was so important that I spent the first half of life pretending I knew more than I did. Over time, in an effort to be authentic, I slowly emerged from that deceptive veil. The lingering consequence of being truthful about myself was that I could no longer swallow my emotions and hide my expressions.

Recently, a friend and I were rehearsing for a talk that we would present to a White audience on microaggressions. “I don’t see color” is a prevalent White microaggression since it’s a refusal to acknowledge the race-based struggles people endure and the discrimination they face. We discussed the outline, who would address what issue, and how to fill the time if no one asked questions. Then he showed me a video he wanted to use of an Asian woman giving a TED talk on microaggressions.

“Are there videos by Black people instead?” I asked.

“There are, but White people often hear this material better if it’s from a light-skinned person.”

“Oh, of course,” I said, as if I knew that.

Suddenly, my breathing sped up. I started sweating and swaying in my chair.

“I have to take a break,” I said.

The awareness that I don’t listen as deeply to Black people as I do to White people filled me with such shame that I almost fainted.

Life was much easier when I learned where babies come from, jumped up, ran around, and tagged the boys in a game of Steal the Bacon. On the playground, we were free to be ourselves, boys and girls, Black, Brown, and mostly White kids whooping it up in a simpler world where there were no microaggressions and we didn’t see color.

Oops.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

On February 15, 1976, I drove my red Toyota ten miles west from my Toms River, New Jersey, home to a small church meeting in Whiting. I’d not had a drink for twenty-four hours. My head was pounding. I shook and shivered and sweated. I sat down but had one foot out the door.

Toms River shoulders the Atlantic Ocean. Most of life there happens near the ocean, its inlets, and brackish rivers. Whiting, known for the now-closed Nature’s Rest Nudist Colony, sits on unceded Leni Lenape land at the northern edge of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. It’s a defunct railroad town surrounded by scrub pines, that dreary little tree that never grows more than eighteen feet because of the sandy soil. No one goes there.

I drove to Whiting to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because I wanted to be anonymous and not run into anyone I knew. I had an overwhelming urge to announce out loud to strangers that I was going to kill myself with vodka.

An active adult community, Crestwood Village, had risen up near Whiting. The eight men and women at the AA meeting were over fifty years old, which was a turn-off for me at twenty-nine. But I was banging on the bottom and had nothing to lose. I thought I’d spill the beans there and bug out for the liquor store on my way home.

The group of eight centered the AA meeting around me and how I could stay sober. They figured out a schedule of who could follow me home that night and stay with me for the next few days. Each day, a different soul appeared on my doorstep to feed me, talk to me, answer the dreaded phone, and connect me to an AA group in my neighborhood. Their messages were the same: you’re sick, we were sick, too. Drink water. Eat chocolate. Go to AA. They trusted me with shocking truths about their lives before sobriety.

They traveled well beyond their small community in the Pine Barrens and re-arranged their comfortable lives to help a suffering alcoholic. The obsession to relieve my misery with booze lifted after about seven days. Each of them called every day for a month.

I never drank again. After a few months, I sold my house, gave away the dog, left an estranged husband, packed up my son and houseplants, and drove to Chicago.

I was a dead soul before I met that group of kind and loving saints in New Jersey’s outback. Every minute of every day, I thought only of drinking and not drinking.

In the forty-eight years since, I’ve met many people who have asked for help. I share the same love that was offered to me that first week. In very few cases, people have stayed sober themselves. Most have disappeared, died, or gotten pissed off and moved on.

Love saved me. That’s all I can wish for others.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: memoir