On the Street Doing Life is a book about an enigma written by an enigma. Anne Keegan doesn’t bore her readers trying to explain Mike Cronin, who wasn’t a typical cop, and I don’t pretend to know what pushes Keegan’s buttons. A monk sworn to a life of silence toots his horn better than Keegan toots hers. We’ve known each other more than 30 years, and her refusal to promote herself falls somewhere between a virtue and a phobia.
But even as a front-page Tribune columnist in the 80s, Keegan would have none of it. “I never wrote about myself,” she says. “They [her Tribune editors] may have decided I didn’t write enough silly stuff about my kids’ diapers. Or about my twins. Or my psychiatrist. Or how I found a coyote in my yard. I may have led a very interesting life, but there are people whose stories are far more fascinating than mine. When I went to Thailand and wrote about the Cambodian refugees did I write, ‘I stood there and watched them crawl across the border’? Oh, please! I wrote about the nurses who picked them up. You don’t say, ‘Oh, I stood there.’ You write about Lisa the nurse from Skokie holding a little boy laden with malaria.
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“Where’s their mother?”
The woman just stood there. So did the two boys. They did not run into her arms nor did she open them . . .
The book’s lighter moments wouldn’t seem so light anywhere else. There’s Rat, a petty thief and user Cronin chased and nabbed and chased again for years. Rat has a certain stature on the street because he once played some ball. “Straight up, it’s true man, he was better than his brother Isiah,” someone says.
