A former Tribune writer’s new book ‘Puddin” is told by a baby, but was inspired by a brother’s suicide
During the more than 30 years that Patrick Reardon worked at the Tribune, he wrote thousands of stories about politics, crime, transportation, neighborhoods, people, and all the other joys and troubles that pepper and define our urban life.
He also wrote books, among them two poetry collections, “Daily Meditations (with Scripture) for Busy Dads” and 2020′s “The Loop: The ‘L’ Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago.”
But nothing he has ever written can match the emotional impact of his latest, a remarkable book titled “Puddin’,” which was the playful name given to him as an infant by his aunt. The book’s subtitle is intriguing and provocative: “The Autobiography of a Baby — A Memoir in Prose Poems.”
That baby is Reardon. The book covers 1950, as well as a few weeks into 1951 and the arrival of his younger brother, which he captures in this way: “I wake. In the dark, in this room, in the new crib next to mine is the new child. His name is David.”
It is David, his life and his death by suicide 64 years later, that was the impetus for this book. “His death was shocking but it wasn’t,” Reardon told me. “He had a lot of pain in his life.”
This book was born of that pain and the emotional confusion and questions that attended David’s 2015 suicide. It brought Pat back to psychotherapy, his first experience lasting most of the 1990s. He did so as part of, he writes, “a journey of my own to understand my brother and me and our relationship and our parents and our common history and our disparate life trajectories.”
He visited this tragedy in his 2017 “Requiem For David,” a gathering of poems that can be seen as laying the foundation for “Puddin’.” It is filled with family photographs.
“Those photos were so important. There were only 40 or so and most of them were so sad for me,” Reardon says. “In none of them am I smiling, neither is David. I need to commune with these photos, to try to find meaning beyond the images.”
This is, make no mistake, a work of fiction, but as Reardon writes in a candid and enlightening “Afterword,” “What I have sought to do here is to translate the inchoate thoughts and sensations of an infant … into a language that hints at the simplicity and complexity of a baby’s mind.”
Toward that end, the baby calls a newspaper “sheets of words” and in his tiny life a radio becomes the “brown box.” Reardon succeeds in this challenging task and I am not the only one to think so.
Haki Madhubuti is a prolific author and poet, teacher, and founder of Third World Press, which has focused on issues and themes related to the African American experience since 1967. He writes in the publisher’s note at the beginning of this book that this is only the second time he has written such a note in the TWP’s history. He tells us why: “The mere thought of writing as one’s infant self is not only a first in poetry, most probably a first in book form … It meets our curiosity head on … I have never come across a memoir of this power, attractiveness, creativity and formative intuition.”
He also writes that Reardon “is not of my culture but provides a great gift for me in understanding his culture.”
Reardon was the first of what would be the 14 children of parents Audrey and David, a Chicago police officer.
“My parents were not what you would call the touchy-feely kind,” says Reardon.
The book is diary-like, with 110 entries, none longer than a page and some as short as seven words, such as “His stone face does not let me in.”
In these words and entries, we discover a world. “The language I created for the baby employs single-syllable words,” Reardon says. There are only two exceptions: David and Puddin’.
There is one entry about a doctor’s visit to the family’s home, another about the baby’s first visit to a park (“Aunt has me on the grass in the park … I like how the blades are cool to my touch … The trees step to the sky. The sky has no end”). The baby visits a tavern and his aunt visits with him (“Her voice smiles. My eyes go wide with joy … The weight of her arms feels good, like I am part of her.”).
But mostly the book is about his parents and his tiny self.
There are moments of sadness, confusion, worry and wonder. There are loud voices and tears. And there is love, as in, “He comes in the door in his blue with the star on his chest … He takes a few steps to her, wraps her in his arms, bends her, leans her back and gives her a kiss on the lips … They leave the room.”
Novelist Charles Dickinson, another Tribune alum, writes that the book will get into your “heart … which will be broken and made whole again over and over.”
Nora Brooks Blakely is a delightful woman, talented writer and the daughter of the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She too fell under the book’s spell, calling it a visit to “the small and large rejections and his attempted connection with the world,” adding, “You will never look at a baby in the same way.”
Reardon has looked at a lot of babies in his life. There have been all of those younger siblings and their families, nieces and nephews. There are his two children with his wife Cathy and three grandchildren, the latest arriving on Jan. 24. His name is Noah Joseph Reardon and his grandfather hopes that his life is filled with smiles.
