Tag Archives: Chicago

Happy New Year: No Fakery, No Frills

2 Replies

If I were writing a traditional New Year’s letter — the greetings that few people send anymore, now that photo-filled Shutterfly and Snapfish cards have replaced the lengthy recountings of successes and celebrations — I would focus on what went well in 2025. Like a Facebook post, my letter would paint a colorful picture of the past 12 months that is exuberant but only partly true.

Because it wouldn’t describe what has been difficult. Or sad. What has made me feel old and out of touch. Where I’ve been wrong, or felt wronged, or made decisions that I regret. The letter would broadcast, even brag, rather than reflect.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

As I write this, I’ve been home alone for two weeks over the Christmas holiday, mothering a tripod cat and two dogs who demand multiple walks a day. Outings with friends and a Christmas Eve gathering with my daughter-in-law’s extended family have been welcome distractions, but mostly I have kept my own company.

“I won’t feel happy all the time this holiday season,” a commentator wrote in a reflection about the 60th anniversary of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the timeless tale of an awkward boy who manages “to find hope” amid a season of mixed blessings. Author Abigail Rosenthal describes Charlie Brown as “anxious and depressed,” employing a lingo that today’s readers will understand. I find him to be honest and touchingly human, unafraid to acknowledge that this weighted holiday carries more expectations — whether religious or secular — than people can possibly achieve.

In that spirit, here’s what 2025 has really felt like for me. How it’s been, rather than what I want you to believe.

The first grandchild

How could the birth of Arthur on July 22nd be anything but a blessing? My younger son is a proud and attentive father; the growing baby came nine days early, and was a full pound and a half smaller than his dad, making labor and delivery relatively smooth; and he is healthy, alert and well loved. We are lucky.

One of the first times I fed him, as Arthur was transitioning to a bottle, I thought of malnourished babies in Gaza. When I left my son’s house, exhausted, after a five-hour babysitting shift, I wondered how overwhelmed, under-resourced single parents manage. Reviewing the photos I take every time I see Arthur, I push away thoughts of all that could go wrong, recalling my sister’s warning when I was pregnant with my first son: Once you have a child, you are always vulnerable.

What you love, you can lose. As a grandmother, in a role consistently described as relaxed and carefree (“you get to send the kids home!”), I didn’t anticipate feeling so unsure of myself, so afraid.

Heeding advice from my peers who became grandparents at a younger age, I have sought to be a helpful, loving presence. But transitioning from Mom to Grandma hasn’t come easily or naturally — I hadn’t held a baby in 30 years — and I’ve had to learn when to bide my time and bite my tongue.

“Do the dishes,” one young mother advised my older son as he prepared for his first visit with his nephew.

A traditional New Year’s letter would extol only the joys of being a grandma, and there are many. But it wouldn’t describe the generational tensions between how we Baby Boomers, the original helicopter parents, raised our kids and what our Millennial offspring expect today:

  • My son insisted that any relative who wanted to be responsible for Arthur’s care enroll in a grandparenting class at Amma Parenting, a women-owned center in an upscale suburb of Minneapolis where he and his partner had taken a daylong parenting class.
  • Given that my sons were circumcised right after birth, which my father recommended, I had to learn the particulars of cleaning an uncircumcised baby boy — and hide my dismay when my son described the procedure as genital mutilation.
  • I’ve abandoned the multicolored, gender-neutral baby blanket I was knitting because babies no longer sleep with blankets. Who knew? Recounting to my son how we tucked him in with a “blanky” and stuffed animals, I was startled by his abrupt response: “Arthur could suffocate.” Today’s babies wear a sleep sack and lie in a barren crib to prevent SIDS, the sudden infant death syndrome that took my husband’s second oldest brother.

What sometimes feels like zealous and unnecessary instruction — how to hold the baby, clean his bottles, push his stroller on a bumpy sidewalk — actually ensures that his parents will entrust me with Arthur’s care. In moments of insecurity, I wonder whether my son found me inadequate as a mother. Or has parenting just progressed and changed?

The only truth that matters is this: If I want a loving, respectful relationship with my grandson, I must set aside my ego and adapt. Healthy aging requires a willingness to learn from our grown children — as well as from our past mistakes.

A period of adjustment

My retirement in September and a deeper dive into volunteering are the other big news for my New Year’s greeting. As with the birth of my grandson, many hearty congratulations have come my way.

But for what? I enjoyed my career. I found purpose in work. It lifted me out of a difficult period in my 20s when I was floundering and making risky, unhealthy choices. And, combined with my husband’s astute investing, the income got both of our sons through college and allowed us to help with down payments on their homes.

Now, as a healthy (so far) retiree of comfortable means, I am supposed to build a life of leisure that runs contrary to my nature. Friends urge me to travel and read more books; and though I am doing more of each — including a first-time trip to London last April — I am noticing a cautiousness that has stifled me throughout adulthood, a tendency to default to the familiar.

Family wedding
June in Chicago

A leisurely ride on Amtrak to visit friends in Chicago and a stop in North Carolina last spring for my niece’s wedding enroute to see my older son in London were enjoyable, relationship-building experiences. But they didn’t stretch me. I didn’t challenge myself to take a solo train trip, which I promised myself I’d do after retirement. I didn’t immerse myself in a different culture or venture on a Civil Rights tour of the south, which long has intrigued me.

Even the warm-weather bike rides that I have loved for decades were on familiar pathways this past year. I never found time to haul my hybrid or road bike to trails and small towns throughout Minnesota, chatting with the locals along the way.

As for reading, it’s way past time to set aside the white women’s fiction that I enjoy and toe-dip into stories that will take me to new places, written by people whose backgrounds and perspectives differ from my own. Here again, I am learning from my younger son, who reads books only by authors from other cultures or with identities he doesn’t share as a middle-class, cisgender white male.

Reading widely means moving beyond your usual comfort zone to understand different human experiences and ideas. 

I thought retirement, given enough resources, would help me feel safe and secure. But challenge and ambition are what I always sought at work. Four months into freeing myself from paid employment, I recognize that the price of less stressful living can be sameness and stagnation — especially at an age when society warehouses seniors into dorm-like housing, walling them off from a community that could enrich elders’ lives and, in turn, benefit from their experience.

Not for me. Not yet. I am determined to live larger in 2026. How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?

Once gun violence hits close to home, what comes next?

12 Replies

I flew to Chicago early on a recent Thursday morning but rode the train home the next day. I needed the space, the spotty WiFi, the long, lonely stretch of eight hours on the Amtrak Empire Builder to steady myself after the whirlwind of the past week.

The shocking news came initially via voicemail and text message and, later, in person amid sobs of disbelief. Then there was the rearranging of schedules, the packing and the journey, the reunion with familiar faces, and finally the funeral of a young woman I have known since her toddler days.

Numbers best describe this memorial service, in a funeral home filled with the sweet smell of flowers and the bittersweet concoction of tears and laughter that always accompanies death.

  • 37, the age of the gunshot victim struck in the back by a bullet intended for someone else on a street in Chicago, during the early evening of Juneteenth.
  • 5, the number of people who asked me in the immediate aftermath whether the violence occurred on the city’s largely Black south side. (For the record, it did not.)
  • 125, the number of minutes the victim’s mother — my oldest friend — had to walk past or sit directly in front of the open casket that held her only daughter.
  • 50, the estimate by my friend’s older brother of how many people traveled to the funeral from New York City, where the victim began her career in the food-and-beverage industry, lauding her in tributes as a caring and generous friend and manager, a vibrant woman who had other people’s backs. Other friends came from the victim’s hometown of Mankato, Minnesota; from her time in college in Rhode Island; and from her three years in Chicago. “It was very clear that this community lost a shining light,” her uncle said, “a term many used to describe [the victim’s] impact on their lives.”
  • 2, the number of times the young widower stood at the podium during the service, visibly stunned, audibly grieving, and described how a bullet had shattered his life, too.

I quit counting the number of sniffles, air gulps, flowing tears and outright sobs by Millennial-age adults too young to be memorializing one of their own.

As we were walking down the street, we heard 3 gunshots. Nichole collapsed into me while grabbing her back, screaming in pain.

The victim’s husband, describing the tragedy on a GoFundMe page

‘I don’t know what to say” was the most common attempt at condolence that my friend heard in the days following her daughter’s murder. For me, a wordsmith, words ceased to matter. My husband and I drove to Janey’s house in a torrential rainstorm, four hours after hearing the news. I didn’t give a thought to how I would greet her. Instinct took over, and I hugged my friend tightly — wordlessly — till she let go.

  • 52, the number of shootings in Chicago over the course of that stormy Father’s Day weekend in June.
  • 15, the number of friends and family members my friend texted the day after the funeral to say an arrest had been made, the detectives had done their work, the omnipresent video cameras in our daily lives, for once, had served their purpose.
  • 5, the number of charges — one count of first-degree murder of my friend’s daughter, four counts of attempted first-degree murder for shooting into a car of visitors from Milwaukee — against the young man who has been arrested as a suspect.
  • 1, the number of times that random, unintended but horribly consequential gun violence previously had pierced my circle of friends and colleagues. My safe middle-class bubble. “This violence is close to home now,” a friend wrote on Facebook. The day we heard the news, the Star Tribune carried a banner headline: “Rising Gun Crimes Defy Answers.” The story described the May 22 death of Charlie Johnson in downtown Minneapolis, a graduating senior at the University of St. Thomas, where I work. Shot in the back, like my friend’s daughter; caught in gang violence, like my friend’s daughter; white and middle-class, like my friend’s daughter, with a promising life ahead.
  • 5, the number of letter writers who decried the easy sale and exchange of guns in our society and “the culture of poverty that produces the despair that fuels violence.”

Prosecutors charged Angel Ayala, 22, with shooting a tourist and murdering a passerby during last weekend’s Puerto Rican Day festivities.

CWB Chicago, June 26, 2021

After a suburban cop shot and killed Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man and school cafeteria supervisor, during a traffic stop in 2016 only miles from my home, I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wanted to comprehend the particular anguish and protectiveness that Black parents feel for their Black sons, a fear and an urgency that I don’t have to experience — even though my older son, the tall blond one, the rebel who sees the underbelly of American society for what it is, was arrested protesting Castile’s murder. Several years later, an officer from the same police force pulled over my son for speeding along the same road. No guns were drawn this time. In fact, the cops apologized for having to impound his car.

Reading isn’t action. It doesn’t change anything. I understand that. But as a college-educated woman reared to revere books, and employed in higher education for the past 20 years, reading is my starting point.

Three days after the funeral, safely home from a city I have vowed never to visit again, I dog-walked by Next Chapter Booksellers, my neighborhood bookshop in St. Paul, and saw historian Carol Anderson’s latest book in the window: The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. I came home and ordered it online, for same-day pickup.

Then I read my friend’s keenly felt message of hope, in a text exchange that has been ongoing since she broke the news to me of her daughter’s death.

Photo by Max Kleinen on Unsplash

“This has nothing to do with politics, religion or anything else but a senseless murder,” my friend Janey said. “My platform now is grief. I’m going to get the word out about gun violence. I’m not sure how, but it is being clarified in my mind today.

“I’m not angry,” she went on, with an eloquence anchored by a mother’s unconditional love. “Nichole’s murder will not go unnoticed. This violence has to stop. Any murder of a son, daughter, mother, father or grandparent has to be honored and noticed by people.”

We notice you, Nichole. We grieve the loss of you. Rest in peace; because the people who loved you — who invested in you, who cared and care about you — will never rest until the streets of our cities are safer for everyone, and until everyone in America, of every color, has a home, an education. And a chance.