Somatic (Trump) Healing

The 2020 Spring confluence of the Covid Shut Down and the Murder of George Floyd both sparked nationwide protests. As an old hippie, I uncharacteristically refrained from the George Floyd, anti-racist marches due to the possibility of covid-contaminated wandering spew. I confined myself to protesting by laptop day and night. On my newly-learned Zoom app, I heard Resma Menakem, psychotherapist and somatic practitioner, offer a description of white supremacy as told in his book, My Mother’s Hands.

Menakem writes that racism is a form of PTSD that resides in white European DNA. He suggests using body-centered awareness and movements to reduce the trauma and tension stored in the nervous system. With Zoom, I began leading a weekly online meditation group using simple breathing instructions. After I read My Mother’s Hands, I subconsciously expanded the instructions to include somatic thoughts and body-centered words.

In September 2026, my Zoom book group concluded a prolonged study of Resma Menakem’s book. As the weekly discussions progressed, I slowly became aware that his work has influenced the guided meditation I use to center us before our group discussions. I consider this gradual insight the most important dimension of our book group work. We may not “get it” right away, but the authors’ influence seeps in through contemplation.

On September 27, 2026, David Brooks talked to Ayad Akhtar on his podcast “The Permanent Questions.” Brooks labeled the session “What Is the Meaning of Mystical Experience?” And centered the discussion around Akhtar’s latest book, The Radiance: A Novel.

Akhtar, my favorite new atheist, revealed that he has a practice that has no words, like a somatic practice of walking in the woods or staring at a sleeping cat. He clearly expects to have transcendent experiences in this practice and used the telling of it to let us know there is a certain spiritual life beyond, or more precisely, without, religion.

I don’t know about you, but deep transcendent experiences, are flittering away these days. The sight of a monarch butterfly is a momentary, rather than a mystical, thrill because we’re told they are disappearing because of us. Happiness, peace, tranquility are fleeting surface emotions. It’s as if Trumpism has physically removed them from my psyche, excised them from my soul. The longing for them has not, however, evaporated. Ayad Akhtar expresses this as the ultimate human emotion — the longing for it.

“Firing Line” host Margaret Hoover asked foreign affairs scholar and measured journalist Anne Applebaum, “If architecture expresses political values, what should the next president of the United States do with the ballroom?”

Applebaum, a Washington DC native, reacted with visible somatic emotion, “Knock it down.”

She’s longing for it. The bodily return to normalcy. Me too. Ayad Akhtar’s novel has the promise of ushering in spiritual relief, regulated breathing, reduced back pain and a quieter stomach—without religion or God.

Walking my dog Elsa does that too.

____________________________________

Guided Meditation as influenced by “My Mother’s Hands.”

Whatever you experience during meditation is right for you. Don’t try to make anything happen, just observe.

Begin by sitting in a comfortable position. Notice how your breath flows in and out. Don’t change your breathing in any way, simply notice how your body breathes. When your thoughts wander, bring your attention back to your breathing.

I close my eyes softly bringing awareness to my breathing.

I allow my mind to rest in my heart as I come into my body.

Sitting still. Relaxed. Alert.

I hold my back straight, not stiff.

My torso rests with ease and comfort centered in my pelvis.

My feet are held up by the floor, my body held down by gravity.

I sense the temperature of the room.

I notice sound.

I notice thoughts of sound.

I imagine stiffness melting away from my neck, shoulders, eyes, forehead, cheeks.

I watch tension leave my face as my jaw drops slightly.

I breathe in. I breathe out.

I have no where to go, nothing to do; need nothing to change. This moment.

And this Moment. And this moment.

I allow complex thoughts to enter my mind and leave my mind. Feelings, plans, fantasies, memories, conclusions, judgements come in and go out. Come in and go out.

The worries of the world do not own me. I do not own the worries of the world.

I bring my focus to my breath as distractions come into my mind.

May I be at peace. May my friends & family be at peace. May my enemies be at peace. May all sentient beings be at peace.

I breathe in. I breathe out.

We Are Warriors: Cold Warriors, AI Warriors

Air raid drills were concocted by the federal government in 1952 through the National Civil Defense Administration to protect people from incoming A-bombs. Common folk-wisdom said only cockroaches would survive a nuclear attack. Nevertheless teachers were required to conduct impromptu air raid drills. They shouted, Drop!—a signal for school kids to jump out of their seats, crawl under their desks, fall over their knees and cover their heads. The nuns in my school 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, 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. I feared the A-Bomb was the worst thing that could ever happen. But. I was not. afraid. to die.

This is it, I’d pray. This is the day I’m going to see Jesus.

I believed Mother Mary would grab me in her arms like she did baby Jesus and take me to heaven. I questioned why we practiced avoiding such ecstasy.

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 saw that there were worse things than death.

New York Times columnist David French, in a NYT: 9/19/2026 podcast “Has Trump Lost Touch with Reality” talks about the AI extinction warning from tech moguls. He reminded us Boomers: “We’re Cold War kids. We know what it’s like to live under the threat of an almost instantaneous extinction-level event…”

Yes we do. And what if these are apocalyptic times? So what? So were the 1950’s. 1960s.1970s. We’ve been here before.

David French is too young to have experienced the PTSD-inducing Drop-and-Cover operation of American school children. In the decades after this fright, those of us who sought professional help for our adult nameless fears, were told about the trauma of having to protect ourselves from mass extinction as first graders. That line of psychology went out of favor around the time of the 1980s “Me” generation when self-realization replaced external influences on our mental health. The idea of being a victim of our circumstances became so uncool. David French, a self-actualized man, certainly has standing as a Cold War kid though. He’s lived through and reported on the threat of a nuclear holocaust.

For Boomers, social psychologists suggest those early childhood extinction threats entombed in our memories, have inoculated us against responding hysterically to the mau-mauing of present-day AI apocalyptic fearmongers.

For non-inoculated GenX, Millennials, GenY, GenZ, GenAlpha, and GenBeta, Mother Mary and Jesus may have gone by the wayside as comfort to those frightened in the AI era. The great search is on for human leaders, political heroes who will save us from robots and cyber agents killing us off.

Where are they?

Ghost of Braunschweiger

Jones sliced Braunschweiger leaped out of the cold cut case into my cart as if a Jack in the Box had sprung to life. Cold cuts, processed meat, have disturbed my exhausted old innards for years. I never wander into that part of the grocery store.

My mother, Agnes, loved Braunschweiger, a sort of evolved liverwurst. Whenever it lay in our refrigerator waiting for her rye bread and mustard, there was danger for curious young epicureans. Agnes’ nonverbal eyeball warning, “I’ll kill you if you touch this,” reminded us that children eat their bologna, not her Braunschweiger.

I was thinking of Agnes because her youngest daughter’s daughter had her own daughter and I wanted to tell her about another of her great grandchildren. At home, I quietly celebrated with Agnes’ forty-year old ghost over the just-purchased Jones’ Braunschweiger and Coca-Cola, whispering sentimentals about her girl’s girls. An interloper may have mistaken this for a seance.

Agnes loved babies. As an alcoholic, she had to choose scotch and beer over mothering her four children. I can’t speak for my siblings, but she gave me a love for babies too. The youngest of Agnes’ grandchildren, her three year-old granddaughter visited me with her mother, my sister, in Chicago thirty-seven years ago, I wanted to sweep up the cutie in soft hugs and protect her from the world, like Agnes would have done if she’d been able.

But even as a three-year-old, she did not need protection. My sister and I took her to a fancy toy store atop a new vertical mall at 900 North Michigan Avenue. Her mother hadn’t spoiled her with a house full of toys. They lived in rural Vermont with real, not stuffed, animals. There was no reason to think she’d be one to grab at the display toys. No, we went for fun, to watch a little girl we loved explore new things.

As her mother and I walked around, exchanging family gossip, we kept watch over the blonde-haired blue-eyed self-possessed three year old. All of a sudden she disappeared. My sister called her, escalating her pitch each time — over and over. No answer. I ran out to the concourse to demand the security officers lock down the building. Everyone in the toy store erupted with their own anxiety. We could not utter our worst fear—that she’d been taken. My sister, unable to express a word, turned more shades of red than exist in the color wheel. Older and presumably wiser, I tried so hard to reassure her. She couldn’t hear a word I said and honestly I’m not sure any real words came out of me.

Then, a tidy shopper looked over her glasses from the children’s books and pointed, “I think she’s over here.”

We rushed to the corner of the store where every kind of doll imaginable stared at us from floor to ceiling shelves. Tucked away under the bottom shelf gurgled my niece, Agnes’ granddaughter, my sister’s little girl, hugging a baby doll. She wouldn’t come out. Her eyes filled up. Through her gulps and watery lips she blubbered, “Don’t take my baby.”

That’s a girl who was born to mother.

And so she is.

Thirty-seven years later.

80th Birthday Celebration: Justice for Wrongly-Accused

Eighty years ago this week, my father, a lawyer, was in the middle of a complicated trial in the military court at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Throughout my childhood I’d heard that my father asked for a pause in the trial to visit my mother and newborn me in the hospital. My birth was announced in the newspaper as part of the daily coverage of the court proceedings.

When I was old enough to ask, I heard from both parents that my father defended Navy personnel for stealing from supply depots. They created a sympathetic narrative, as if the defendants were either wrongly accused or were poor and the crime was justified. When I was old enough to brag about my father to my friends I added color to the defendants’ stories—petty officers sending necessities home to their poor families.

In my fifties I searched the archives in the Naval Academy Library for the article announcing my birth. Before I started rolling through microfiche, I called my father and asked for some common names and dates to research besides my birth date.

“I can’t remember,” he said, “call me when you get home.”

Newspaper articles from 1946 report details of my father’s part in the trial. In the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), he worked not as a defender of the disadvantaged but as a prosecutor.

The day my birth interrupted the trial, June 13, 1946, my father was about to call an important witness to testify against former Chief Steward Walter W. Rollins. Rollins, “a Negro”, was accused of throwing an all-night party in his basement quarters of the Officers’ Mess with five White people. As the trial continued, the witness testified they all played penny-ante poker from 1:30 am until 9:30 am, but no money changed hands. The unsubstantiated charges against Rollins included adultery with a White woman, a morals offense, gambling, embezzlement, misconduct and theft. He reportedly took a jug of whiskey from the Officers’ Mess. Rollins was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

None of the White people involved were held accountable, though trial records indicate Rollins felt pressured into submitting to the demands of the White partiers. After twenty-seven years of service to the Navy, Rollins was demoted to First Mate and received a bad conduct discharge.

No wonder my father dodged the truth about his JAG history at Annapolis. Until late 1944, he had been in the elite Naval Air Corps, trained on the prestigious Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber. Headquartered in Key West, he patrolled the Florida Straits for German submarines. He’d been arrested for drunken brawls and jailed for extended periods leaving his New Jersey bride alone in a strange town with no friends or family. He acquired illegal Cuban rum, cigars and dry goods, flew the contraband back to Key West and sold it to his fellow sailors.

After the war, as a new law school graduate, he reported for duty to the military court at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He had just been commissioned a Lieutenant Commander, had been a scholarship student at Georgetown University and Law School. For all his college and post graduate years, he secretly funded extracurriculars with illegal money he earned at all-night high-stakes bridge games.

White privilege saved my father, a conspicuous law-breaker, from prison. I hope he and my mother were so ashamed of his part in ruining Rollins life that they lied about it for the rest of their lives. As a lawyer he never took on trial work again.

Walter W. Rollins was the father of Jazz legend Sonny Rollins. On his sixteenth birthday, Sonny, his mother and brother watched their father get hauled off to jail for two years. My father surely knew what I discovered in the Naval Academy archives. When I returned home to Chicago with my old newspaper printouts, I had questions. He refused to discuss it. I never overcame fear of my father’s wrath in his lifetime — not sure I’ve done so even now– and this was clearly an issue I had not the courage to pursue.

Sonny Rollins spent decades trying to clear his father’s name. In September, 2025, the Secretary of the Navy finally reversed the court-martialed conviction. Sonny died on May 25 at the age of ninety-five. One of the last things he saw was a draft of an article in The Nation reporting the story of justice for his wrongly-accused father. It appears in the July-August edition.

I’m deeply grateful for visits, gifts, celebrations and tributes for my eightieth birthday. However, reading about Walter R. Rollins’ overturned racially motivated conviction, prosecuted by my father eighty years ago, thrills to a depth I’ve never known.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does indeed bend towards justice.

Jesus, Pokemon and Ethiopianism

At Chicago’s Harold Washington Library we waded into a steamy sea of book fans side-stroking their way toward venues of favored authors. The American Writer’s Museum had given us a full free day of writers, a literal, literary event.

Jen Hatmaker, podcaster and author of fourteen books, slipped a throw-away into her talk about leaving her church because of patriarchy and racism. My companion and I gave each other the curious huh? look. The uninteresting story of her divorce that followed soaked up the rest of the hour. We wanted more scuttlebutt about her leaving the church, but no time to meet her — our next talk had already begun.

Navigating our way onto an elevator to the third floor for “Faith, Connection and Social Change in Black Chicago” we sat in curious anticipation. Reginald Blount, director of the Center for the Church and the Black Experience at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, interviewed Kai Parker, Assistant Professor of African American Religious History at the University of Virginia and author of City of Black Souls. These two heaved weighty thoughts onto a head-shaking well-informed audience.

Professor Parker anchored his talk to the late 19th and mid-20th century African American Protestants in Chicago. He said Ida B. Wells and others gleaned ideas from ethiopianism. She wrote that the movement for Black freedom was not just a struggle against Jim Crow, but a wider, global liberation movement against Western imperialism and racial hierarchy. Having never heard of ethiopianism, we huh?ed each other again. Parker’s words floated way above my uninformed curiosity. But no time for questions. We had thirty minutes to chase down a sandwich before the next talk.

We broke out of the building onto four-lane Ida B.Wells Drive. All corners teemed with Pokemon people (were they at all curious about the street name?). Some wore foam hats of the Pokemon mascot, Pikachu. But the dead giveaway was the huddled groups walking while diving into their phones. Another huh? moment and no time to stop and ask for a Pokemon explanation.

Rushing back to the monstrous Harold Washington Library, we found each other in the auditorium’s front row looking up at fast-talking six-foot-tall John Fugelsang. A stand-up comic, his book, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, established his bible bona fides through stories about his mother, a Catholic nun, and father, a Franciscan priest.

Fugelsang entertained us with how to talk to MAGA Christians about religion and politics.

“People get God and religion confused,” he said. “I think God is a bit too hip to join any of his unauthorized fan clubs.”

We were not confused. He was hilarious. No time to ask, “were your parents married?” and other naturally nosy huhs? about his upbringing. The next talk with Reza Azlan required settled attention.

Remember the book, Zealot? When Reza Azlan hoisted his blockbuster on us in 2013, religion teachers and leaders throughout the land were rending their garments answering boatloads of questions about a new idea of Jesus, the politically conscious revolutionary.

Reza packed thousands of entertaining facts into the allotted time. He went overboard answering questions about how the historical Jesus has seeped into the collective psyche, evidenced by many who offhandedly say, “Jesus was political.”

Library staff herded us out of the closing HWL onto the sidewalk to — guess what? Pokemon. The Pokemon Go! Fest drew 40,000 people a day to the city.

Exhausted, more mentally than physically, we went our separate ways home without a wrap-up coffee shop chat and chuckle on ethiopianism, Jesus and Pokemon. On the standing room only bus, chill revelers from a free day at Millennium Park’s Blues Fest were asking the bus driver how to get home.

You really gotta love Chicago.

Awesome Death Anxiety

Journalist Kara Swisher has a six-part series on living forever or, not dying too early or some such idea. Last week, I woke from an unplanned late afternoon nap to hear her CNN interview with a wild-haired scientist about the fear of dying.

The scientist proclaimed the fear of dying motivates every human, all day, all night, from the beginning of time. Obsessive acquisitions of money, power, big houses and boats is a reaction to the base fear of dying.

The antidote to this death anxiety is awe. Awe. A.w.e. Awe.

Awe revitalizes the deep need to be alive. Embracing awe unlocks the idea that death is not just bondage but an opening. Holding both thoughts at once reduces the subconscious but crippling anxiety of death.

Sitting under a leafed-out hawthorn tree on a park bench, I hung onto these thoughts as I savored the look and the smell of a nearby lilac bush. Awe was working. I felt death anxiety dissipating.

The sound of a crackling branch overhead should have startled me, scared me. In the distance I saw a shouting seventh-grade-size boy running toward me.

“What?” I inquired of myself.

“@#$%^&*” was all I heard.

He hurried up to me pointing at the tree. A midsize branch had broken off the top of the tree trunk. The mishmash of boughs below caught the crackup before it fell on me. But it was slowly crunching its way toward the ground.

I jumped off the bench into death anxiety. The boy, smiling with relief, picked up a previously grounded limb and threw it into the tree to dislodge the broken branch.

“Vamos! Vamos!” The boy yelled as he threw the branch at the suffering hawthorn over and over.

I stood back and watched the joy-filled seventh grader doing his part to make the park safe for passersby, dog walkers and bench sitters. Awe. Some.

Along came two coutured men with their two French Bulldogs. One rushed to the boy to stop him, as if he were vandalizing the park.

“No. No. No.” I stepped in front of him.

“That branch almost fell on me and he saved me! He’s trying to knock it out of the tree onto the ground.”

The men were puzzled. Looking at me, back at the boy, their eyes betrayed a lifelong preconceived notion of a pre-teen Hispanic boy. I engaged them with curiosity about the dogs. Men with cute little boutique dogs love to talk about dog pedigree. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the branch come down and the boy skip away to join his family on the other side of the park.

Awe. Some.

Doomsday Prophecies: From Hal Lindsey to Trump’s NAR

In the early 1970s the doomsday prophecies in Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, stoked my Toms River, New Jersey, Christian fundamentalist cult. Little did I know that the prophesies of the cult religion of my youth would come true through a new religious movement, the National Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Fifty years later.

Based on his interpretations of the Book of Revelations, Hal Lindsey connected end-of-the-world Biblical prophecies to current events. In his view, Satan’s plans to form a one-world government and religion were triggered by the establishment of the state of Israel and the World Council of Churches—both in 1948.

Converts, like me, of the 1970s Jesus movement, still flash-backing to acid trips, saw signs of the end times around every corner. In our small church community, anti-globalism was our protest because Satan was using the banks to form a global economy. We boycotted the Bank of America. We refused to use credit cards. We wrote letters condemning the birth of the European Union. An increase in the divorce rate, recreational drugs, new technology, the gasoline shortage, religious ecumenism. All these signaled the diabolic end of the world, the coming of the Antichrist, or some kind of unearthly vision that terrified vulnerable young comfort-seekers.

I left the Christian cult after sobering up in Alcoholics Anonymous, divorcing an abusive husband, and moving 1,500 miles away from the scene.

Starting in the 1980’s, unbeknownst to me, Christian fundamentalism slowly morphed into the New Apostolic Reformation. The prime NAR chronicler, Matthew D. Taylor, describes the NAR’s leadership as a “spiritual oligarchy” of apostles and prophets. Apparently God has told NAR adherents that Donald Trump is their spiritual leader. You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself, but the results are obvious.

The NAR apostles and prophets tell Trump his job is to “advance God’s earthly kingdom so Christ can return.” Advancing the earthly kingdom is outlined in Project 2025. The elimination of abortion and women’s rights; same-sex marriage and gay rights; dismantling USAID as a stand against globalism—all the shockers in the first year of Trump 2.0 are advancing the earthly kingdom.

Venezuela is the biggest shocker so far, at least for me. Fifty years ago I learned that the Book of Revelations prophesied God would make the United States, Russia and China the world’s three spheres of influence. The United States would get the entire Western Hemisphere. Russia gets its region, and Europe. China gets all of Asia, India, Africa. This is the umbrella of national sovereignty, the opposite of international integration and the seeds of anti-globalization.

A radio broadcaster startled me on Saturday morning, January 3, with the news that the US invaded Venezuela. The long-forgotten voice of myself as a 25-year-old Jesus Freak bellowed, “Uh. Oh. Wake up. It’s happening.”

Donald Trump, in a 2017 speech to the Joint Congress, announced he was not the President of the world. Instead, he stated, he was the President of America. These words sent a signal to anti-globalists and end-times prophets around the world. It was a declaration that the US will once again dominate the Western Hemisphere. Vladimir Putin confidante Alexander Dugin, heard the call and issued a statement that traditionalism had won, globalism lost.

Anthropologists say pandemic uncertainty, virtual reality, environmental issues, old-age anxiety, border disputes, memory disorder, and gender trouble put society in a self-protective liminal state, a state betwixt and between. Perhaps these unsettling markers ushered in Donald Trump as the leader of the new world order. Now that we’ve fallen over the threshold, what do we do?

I don’t know.

But holy shit.

Wake up.

It’s happening.

Dead Dogs

The cat jumped from the cabinet behind the Christmas tree onto the back of the couch and slinked over to perch behind the woman sitting across from me.

“Watch out! The cat’s behind you,” a nearby party-goer warned.

“Oh that’s ok. I like cats,” said the guest in proper guise.

Staring down the resident pet, I drifted off to a time long ago when I was in the same position as the proper guest. When I turned to greet the host’s cat (a stupid-human gesture), she swatted me in the face, claws out.

The Christmas party conversation turned to pets.

“Do you have any pets?” I was asked.

“Oh yes, I have a Westie.”

I love my dog and I talk to her a lot, but I don’t talk about her much. My mother, Agnes, hated people who anthropomorphized their pets. Really hated them. My feelings aren’t as strong but I have the genes—an aversion to pet talk.

It turns out Agnes was onto something. As long ago as the 1870s Charles Darwin criticized the natural tendency to ascribe humanlike attributes to non-human animals. His pitch was for humans to show as much interest to the natural world of insects and plants as we do to our pets. In doing so, he opened the forbidden subject of anthropomorphism. Darwin’s England was ground zero for the upper classes treating their pets like children or stand-ins for friends. Since then, many scientific abstracts and PhD theses have tried to punctuate the negative consequences of anthropomorphism: over-spending on human-like clothes, feeding pets non-compatible human food, beautifying dogs with toxic cologne, nail polish, breath freshener and worst of all, expecting non-human animals to have human emotions.

I suspect Agnes was more drawn to anthropomorphism than her sophistication would allow. Her sobering suggestion that trees are worth adoration are probably my earliest spiritual experience of our life together. Another was her reverence in quietly revealing the nesting robin’s eggs outside the bathroom window. But she’d never stand for conversations about them. In her world, if you didn’t present a funny story based on serious articles from the New York Times or Time Magazine, you were an out and out bore. Her ghost leads me to the Never-Trumper’s Bulwark podcasts, whose tagline reads “a few laughs to wash down the crazy.”

There’s a trail of dead dogs nipping at my aging heels. I threw this into the mix at the Christmas party in order to join the pet talk.

“Do you dream about dogs from your past?” Someone asked of no one in particular.

“All my dead dogs are present,” I blurted out.

It’s a goofy thing to say, like I’m a Buddhist or Spiritualist or the crazy white-hair in the corner with her Diet Coke. Other than my dog Henry, who talked to me during the Covid shutdown, I’ve always thought of my pets as nothing more than animals (forgetting that I, too, am an animal). No fancy garments, doggy day care or prepared meals. But as dead pals, they are sentient. Here. They may be the beings between the here and the hereafter, waiting to guide me to wherever that is. I hope so.

I’ll need protection to escape the cruel and the crazy running my country.

Knock On Wood

The activist community that confronted ICE in Chicago has quieted down for the winter since ICE commander Gregory Bovino hightailed it out of town with 100 of his 200 military combatants. Southern activists report that ICE is wreaking havoc on the streets of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast towns while training the 10,000 newly-enrolled ICE recruits. In the Upper Midwest, we’re like mama bears and cubs in hibernation. We’re squirreling away our esprit to ready ourselves for the war we expect ICE to launch over the threshold in the spring.

Oh, there are cadres of fresh revolutionaries protesting against high property taxes at winterized town halls. Indivisible and other groups are keeping the newly activated engaged with Happy Hours, Coffee Hours and Sound Baths. And eager canvassers are stepping out in the cold to knock on doors for their favorite state and local candidates.

llinois’ 2026 primary is March 17. In times past, a St. Patrick’s Day election meant a big turnout at the polls. Can you guess why? Yeah, a lot of people took the day off for the parade and voted afterwards. But Illinois Governor Pritzker has told us that Bovino and his returning troops may try to disrupt our elections. What does that mean?

No one has a clue.

Amidst all this dread of the future present, I received an unexpected message about my life story that put the worries of the world on the back burner. In 2020 Tortoise Books Chicago published a memoir I’d written thanks to the encouragement of friends.

A few years after I retired I attended a poetry reading at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Shuffling up to Poet/Author/Moviemaker Kevin Coval, I disclosed, “I wish I could write”.

“Everyone can write. Everyone has stories to tell,” Kevin responded. “Come Saturday afternoon to the writing class. It’s free.”

Kevin and the others welcomed me, a much older student, into the upper room of significant creatives. One day he introduced me as “one of our writers,” and a bolt-of-lightning zipped around my bones.

Beth Finke, memoir writing teacher extraordinaire, praised my weekly essays while x’ing out the “weak” verbs and extraneous paragraphs. Writing expended a lot of brain energy and I often gave up from exhaustion. Then Beth would assign an energizing prompt like, “the tune you most remember from childhood” (Elvis’ Hound Dog). Poor thing had to listen to every detail of every step in the long saga of getting my book published.

Vivienne, an accomplice in many adventures, insisted I write a book so she could make a movie about my life. This seemed preposterous, but slipped into the maybe compartment when she wrote, produced and directed her full-length feature, “Dare to be Wild” (Netflix). It still seemed preposterous because as a friend asked me recently, “Is your life that interesting?” No. Yet, Kevin Coval attests every life is interesting.

The unexpected news I received this week puts the idea of a production, based on my book, on the front burner, in the cards, out front, on center stage, in the spotlight, on the radar, on a winning streak, ahead of the game, beating the odds, nailing it, on fire.

Knock. On. Wood.

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.

Regan Burke

Author "In That Number" from local booksellers or Amazon

Tag: memoir