My friend Mark and his wife Cathy were coming home on a mid-March Saturday from the sad burden of the funeral of their 42-year-old daughter Margaret. Margaret, a wife and the mother of three children, 5 and younger, had died of breast cancer a...
Cathy gave me a haircut today on the back porch. In our 37 years of marriage, that hasn’t happened before, but we’re not leaving the house for haircuts or much anything else, and I was getting pretty shaggy, and, well, we made do. (I hope...
The afternoon was cold, dark and rainy at Calvary Cemetery. Maybe that’s why I ended up in my short walk there, focusing on the textures of things, such as this sideview of one of several angels adorning a tombstone. I liked...
None of my own by Patrick T. Reardon I packed books in boxes and notes in boxes and pens and rulers and pads of paper and photos in frames and maps and small things without any category that reminded me of a person I’d met or...
David R. Slavitt’s 2001 The Book of Lamentations: A Meditation and Translation is a post-Holocaust reading of the short biblical work inconsolably grieving the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BC and the Babylonian exile of...
I found God in the pain of my brother’s suicide. I don’t want to tell this story again — of my brother David, wracked with pain, dragging himself out his back door at 3 a.m. with rain-snow falling, to end his life with a gun. David and I...
In 1972, when P.D. James published An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, she’d been a novelist for just a decade. Her first four books were centered on Adam Dalgleish, a tightly constrained, deep-feeling police detective who is also a modestly...
Building ornamentation caught my eye today, and one little city emblem: Patrick T. Reardon 4.16.20 ...
Saint Teresa of Avila was a woman of 16th century Spain, a nun mystic experienced in the bliss and pain of religious ecstasy but also nun living under the power of male clergy and hierarchy who were wont to mistrust women and mysticism. One of...
Ecclesiastes Road By Patrick T. Reardon See and see: Each time passes. Journey is taken. River runs. Green brittles. Tall withers. Sun is blind. Blood dries to grit. Clock locks. I line my dashboard with communion of saints...
One of the guys from basketball at the Levy Senior Center in Evanston is recovering, apparently well, from the coronavirus. But he’s been stuck in a motel for weeks. So, at noon today, a bunch of us formed a cavalcade to drive past as he...
The girl walks down to the lake to the spot where she and her father fish. A goose and gander and five goslings are there, making a home for the summer for themselves. The girl is ten. As she approaches the water, she startles the geese. The...
Eternal By Patrick T. Reardon Eternal, puzzle us, puzzle us clockwork apart and put us back together, create/re-create, Eternal, cycle us and puzzle us to ourselves, puzzle us revelations long withheld. Puzzle...
The lakefront parks are closed, as are all the other city parks. Walking on the sidewalks of Edgewater — normally an invigorating exercise — is weird. I find myself scanning ahead of me to judge whether anyone’s coming near me, whether the...
The story of French noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque de Roberval has been told and retold over the past 150 years in popular entertainment — several historical novels, poems, a biography, a short story, book chapters, a play, two television...
Eliot Pattison’s The King’s Beast: A Mystery of the American Revolution is a potboiler stew of brutality, detective work, derring-do, tribal gods, forest lore, London lore, an evil Earl, torture, a Greek- and Latin-spouting tribal leader...
April 3, 2020 By Patrick T. Reardon I learned my ABCs long ago and know the dance inside darkness. Better to stumble and bang and crash in shadows than corner-sit waiting for sun. Mournful either way, yet joy in...
Unknown Man No. 89, published in 1977, is certainly an Elmore Leonard novel. It has all the elements. It’s built around Jack Ryan, a basically good guy, like all of Leonard’s heroes, who gets into something way beyond his control, as when he...
Early on, it was pretty clear that my wife and I — both over that red-alarm age of 60 — are going to be spending basically all our time in our home for what could easily be many months. And one of my first thoughts was….time to read a long book!...
Eight and a half years ago, an elderly friend of mine died, and one of the guys I play basketball with got leukemia. It got me thinking about that thing we always seem to believe is unthinkable — Death. So I sat down and planned my funeral...
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