Sunday, September 7, 2025
D+306/231/-1231
The 70 Roman army under General Titus occupied and plundered Jerusalem.
1812 Battle of Borodino: Napoleon won a pyrrhic victory against Russia in the most ferocious battle of the Napoleonic era; 70,000 were killed
1940 Beginning of the Blitz as the Luftwaffe bombed London for the 1st of 57 consecutive nights, losing 41 bombers as the Nazis prepared to invade Britain
1963 American Bandstand moved to California
1986 Desmond Tutu became the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town
2019 US President Donald Trump said he had canceled a secret meeting with the Taliban for peace talks at Camp David
In bed at 9, up at 5:45. 45°, wind chill 38°, high 64°, sunny morning, partly cloudy afternoon.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 8:12 a.m. My right hand and its outer fingers ache, as does my right shoulder. I woke up during the night with a nasty pain in my hip. I think it was the right one, and that I was sleeping on my right side, but I'm not sure about either of those guesses.
Gratitude journal. I am grateful for all the birds who visit our feeders, and for the squirrels that put on shows of acrobatics, and the white-tail deer. They remind me that we share the same living space. We also share the same living space with our neighbors, and we respect one another so as to live together peacefully, respectfully, and beneficially. This works on the neighborhood level, but not on the national level, or even the large group level, where we inevitably strive for dominance over one another. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society.
The Long, Hard Slog: the basement. I made more progress this morning, throwing much paper into a construction waste bag and getting it upstairs. I couldn't get myself to toss my ol teaching materials from some courses I taught late in my life at the law school, The Lawyer in American Society, Pretrial Practice workshop, Law and Legal Ethics. I suppose I should bite the bullet and send all that to the landfill, along with the earlier drafts of the memoir and some early journal pages, but I have to work my way up to that, along with trashing my old uniforms. All in good time.😁 Geri and I moved one of her hobby tables from the common area into the storage area. The best news was that I was able to schlep the heavy bag of papers up the stairs.😅
The Un-Orthodox. I took a break from dealing with the basement to watch episode 3 of this series on Netflix. It is painful to watch the suffering of the young woman protagonist of the series. Much of it flowed from her inability to experience sexual intercourse without pain, and the failure to get pregnant and produce a child, a scandal in their ultra-orthodox Jewish community, which viewed itself as reproducing the 6 million Jews lost in the Holocaust. It reminded of my parents. From my memoir:
Until I wrote these memoirs, I never thought in any focused way about the first years of my parents’ marriage. I knew that they were very young and that they were working class people with little money. I knew they lived in very modest circumstances. I assumed that they were reasonably happy until my father returned from the war. I have come to question that assumption.
Since I started this writing project, I have learned that my father was jealous of my mother, that sexual intimacy was painful for my mother, that my father worked in a war industry and could have, but did not, request a draft deferment, and that my mother wrote to him very seldom while he was away. These perhaps unrelated facts hardly lead inexorably to any conclusion about their marriage, but they support – though inconclusively – a hypothesis that the marriage was strained before my father left for the Marines in early 1944.
The jealousy matter does not come as a total surprise. My mother was pretty, full of life, vivacious and outgoing, with many friends and an openness to new friendships. She sang, she danced, she smiled and laughed easily. People liked her, both men and women, and she generally liked them back. My father, on the other hand, was then, as he is now, shy and unsure of himself in social settings other than the familiar. He came from a family to whom laughter and joyfulness and openness to life did not come easily. If my paternal grandparents had any personal friends other than one neighbor from across the alley, I never saw them or heard them spoken of. It is not surprising that my father had a pinched and rather sour view of life and I suspect that his attraction to my mother was based in large part on the fact that she did not look at life through the same myopic lenses he did. His friends in his adulthood were, with few exceptions, friends from his youth in Englewood: Chubby and Al Hawes, Al Braley, and Don and ‘Toots’ Rashcka. Beer was his lubricant and catalyst for social interactions. His zones of social interaction were family gatherings (i.e., with his parents and sister), get-togethers with the friends from ‘the old neighborhood,’ and familiar taverns. His only good friends, not from his childhood, were Marty and Marie Rohan, fellow habitués of Andy’s North Pole Tavern. Considering their profoundly different personalities, it is not surprising that what my father found attractive in my mother before their marriage, he found threatening after their marriage, especially after the two years of separation due to his conscription. Jealousy and mature, loving relationships are mutually exclusive, which suggests to me that the marriage was challenged from the beginning.
The painful intercourse matter could be a problem in any marriage, of course, but a much bigger problem in a marriage in which the male is young, insecure, and jealous. Painful physical intimacy can lead to feelings of rejection and inadequacy on the part of the male, contributing to the problem of jealousy. Was this the case with my mother and father? I can only guess, but my guess is that it was. My father, like most insecure people, was prone to resentments, i.e., to taking things personally. He had a habit of saying “I resent that,” where other people might say “That bugs me,” or “I hate that,” or “That really pisses me off.” For example, high prices for goods or services he would “resent.” For a long time, I thought he was simply using the term loosely and incorrectly, but on reflection, I think he may have been using the term accurately. He never had much money but this fact was attributable mostly to his own behaviors, e.g., dropping out of high school when he didn’t have to, never getting a GED or further education or training, though it was available, and alcoholism, all compounded by the effects of PTSD after the war. The high cost of restaurant meals, for example, for him may have been a reminder of his inability to pay the cost easily which causes him ‘resent’ the prices, to take personally what others would shrug off, perhaps disgustedly or even angrily but not resentfully. With such a husband, having a physical problem that could be interpreted as rejection could also earn one resentment. So could popularity and sociability.
Of the 16,000,000 men who served in the military during World War II, 6,000,000 were volunteers and 10,000,000 were draftees. The draft began in October 1940, a couple of months after my parents married. The term of service was 12 months, but that changed after the war started. All men between 18 and 45 were eligible for military service, but occupational and hardship deferments were available. Farmers, auto workers, munitions workers, and many others whose work was important to the war effort were not drafted. My father’s job at Johnson & Johnson was making sanitary dressings for combat wounds; he was employed in a war industry. He had one small child and, after November 1943, another on the way. When I asked him recently why he didn’t apply for a draft deferment, occupational or hardship or both, he just shrugged. Was his passivity prompted by patriotism or something else? It may have been patriotism, of course; there was of lot of it afoot during the war, and there is no reason to think that he was any less patriotic than the next guy. It may have been pride and a fear of being considered a ‘shirker,’ one who failed, as the Irish would have said, to “do his bit” while others were fighting and dying. It also may have been, however, at least in part, a desire to get away, to escape the responsibilities of married life and fatherhood. He had just turned 23 when Kitty was conceived and he was to be the father of two by age 24. Did he want to get away, to live among other young men, with no wife or children about? It certainly would not have been an unusual desire for one who had married and become a parent at so young an age. If he didn’t desire to be drafted, for whatever reason or reasons, why did he not seek an occupational or hardship deferment, like hundreds of thousands of other draft-age men? Did he and my mother discuss the possibility of deferment, especially when she became pregnant with Kitty? As it was, when he was drafted, she was left at age 22 with me 2½ years old, and Kitty on the way, and precious few resources to rely on. Could either patriotism or pride make up for the difficult situation she was in? Was he using the draft as a way to run away from responsibilities, rather like walking away from the responsibilities of high school to make a few bucks as an unskilled worker? If so, each decision represented seizing on a short-term solution to an immediate frustration, with long-term negative consequences. Though I am only guessing on the basis of very inadequate evidence, and perhaps projecting, my best guess is that that was what was going on between my parents in 1944.
My guess about my father’s draft status is supported by the knowledge, based on my father’s statement to Geri that my mother seldom wrote him during his service. Neither my father nor my mother was a letter writer, but that would not explain long periods of silence from her. She was too responsible and loyal to everybody close to her for her to ignore her husband once he was gone unless perhaps she believed herself to have been abandoned by him, left in the lurch with a toddler and a baby on the way by an immature and selfish husband. Perhaps it is only my loyalty to my mother that causes me to put this ‘spin’ on the scant evidence available to me, but I don’t think so. All of her actions after the war and for the rest of her life demonstrated beyond question what kind of person she was; there was no way she would have ignored her husband after he was drafted unless she believed that he had walked out on her, with the local draft board providing the cover. (Another possibility, of course, is that my father overstates the lack of mail issue but, whatever his faults and weaknesses, I have never known him to be anything other than truthful and I take him at his word.)
If the parting at the beginning of 1944 was beset with troubles, the reunion at the end of 1945 must have been even more so. My parents had been separated almost two years with little communication, my father was suffering from PTSD compounded undoubtedly by anger and resentment about the paucity of letters and further compounded by rampant alcoholism. The man who returned from the war was not the man who left and the family he left was not the family he came home to. At my age, I would have had virtually no memory of him from two years earlier and Kitty at 15 months of age had never seen him. He was a stranger to us and, especially in his condition, undoubtedly an unwelcome intruder into our home and our hitherto uncomplicated relationship with our mother.
Even without the PTSD, his relationship with my mother must have been terribly strained. With the PTSD and the drinking and the living in the basement shoebox, the situation must have been at times nearly intolerable. For him, the insecurity and jealousy problems must have been doubled and redoubled by the lengthy separation and lack of letters. For her, the challenges of raising two little kids with hardly any money were compounded by having an angry, resentful, sullen, withdrawn, beer-benumbed husband to deal with.
His haven was the North Pole Tavern with other drinkers. I don’t know where my mother found a haven, perhaps with our good next-door neighbor, Ann Semrau. I doubt that she found much succor with the other Clausens, since (1) they were dealing with Monica’s divorce and the need to raise her three small children without help from their father, and (2) my father may have poisoned the well, especially with his mother, with complaints about my mother’s not writing. I believe my grandmother had little if any, affection for my mother ever. Late in her life, my mother returned from one trip to Florida with my father to visit his parents and told Kitty that she would never return. Grandma Clausen had had too much to drink one day or evening and laid into my mother. It hadn’t been the first time this had happened, but my mother was resolved that it would be the last.
While I was writing these reflections, I watched an interview of Larry McMurtry on CBS Sunday Morning. He was discussing his writing the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. One of his observations seems apt here:
Life is not for sissies. You need strength. Love is not easy. It’s not easy if you find it. It’s not easy if you don’t find it. It’s not easy if you find it but it doesn’t work out. The strong survive, but not everybody is “the strong” and many people don’t.
In another interview of a woman whose identity I can’t recall, she reported being very unhappy about some event or condition in her life. Her mother told her: “Look, daughter, being happy is hard work. Get to it. Shape up!” She was right.
I have mentioned before that I don’t remember any friends visiting us in the basement apartment, other than one visit by my father’s Marine Corps buddy, Theron (Mac) McClain. Not even Chubby Hawes or Al Braley. Other than Grandpa Dennis and Uncle Jim, I don’t remember any family members coming to our home. Not even Grandpa or Grandma Clausen or Aunt Monica. It wouldn’t have been the waterbugs or the hot water pipes or the cramped space that kept people away, but rather the tension within the space, the persistent unhappiness.
At Passover seders, Jews sing a prayer of thanksgiving called Dayenu, a Hebrew expression meaning “it would have been enough.” The dayenu verses relate 15 great blessings God conferred on the Hebrews, after each one acknowledging dayenu, it would have been enough, though yet another blessing followed. “Had he (only) brought us forth from Egypt, and not (also) destroyed their idols, Dayenu, it would have been enough for us.” Dayenu can also be used negatively and sarcastically in referring to misfortunes piled on misfortunes. I am reminded of dayenu in writing that Iwo Jima was enough to extinguish joy in my father’s life. It would have been enough. As it turned out, a brutal crime against my mother in 1947 completed the job.
Reading these words that I wrote 20 or more years ago is painful. They remind me of the saying, attributed to Robin Williams, "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about." I like the saying and believe it is packed with wisdom. We don't know one another, even those we think we know well. We don't know their history, all the forces and conditions that contributed to the person we think we now know. Most of all, we don't know our own parents, or even our own siblings, though I suspect that it may be our siblings that we know best of all. I stress "may be." I have never been closer to anyone, except perhaps Geri, than I was to my sister Kitty, but I learned only when we were in our late 50s or early 60s that she had been molested by our maternal grandfather when she was a child. It happened once and wasn't repeated. I don't know how he molested her; she didn't say, and I didn't ask. It was probably some "inappropriate" touching, but it frightened her, she resisted, and he stopped. She never told our mother, and she told me only after reading my memoir, which turned out to be distressing and painful for her. How much else about her life did I never know, and she about my life? Bill Clinton was famous for telling voters, "I feel your pain." Pain is personal. We can sympathize, we can empathize, but we can't feel another's pain. The chances are great that we don't even know of the pain.
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