2/28/2026

 Saturday, February 28, 2026

1933 On Adolf Hitler's advice, German President Paul von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree after the building was destroyed by fire in Berlin; this eliminated many civil liberties in Germany

1953 Crick and Watson discovered the chemical structure of the DNA molecule

2013 The brains of two rats were successfully connected so they could share information

The 2022 UN Landmark climate change report warned that climate change is outpacing human efforts to adapt, with a best-case scenario rise of 1.5C, and 14% of species face a "very high risk of extinction." 

2025  A 24-hour consumer spending boycott takes place across the United States, in protest of wealth and income inequality, high prices of essential goods, and the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives by the Trump administration. 

2025  The Social Security Administration announces it will lay off over 7,000 jobs to align with President Donald Trump's executive order, despite its workforce already being at a 50-year low. 

2025   Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended their talks early after their Oval Office meeting turned into a "heated" exchange. Trump rejectsed any discussion of security guarantees for Ukraine, expressing interest only in a Mineral Resources Agreement.   Their lunch was cancelled and Zelenskyy was escorted from the White House, hungry.

In bed at 9, up at 0615.  28/15/40/22  122/77/57   205.4  111   

Morning meds and half-dose of heart med at  a.m.

US and Israel Start War with Iran

Who is he talking about, the Iranian government or ours?  Or both?

Who runs America, Netanyahu and AIPAC, or Putin?  And, BTW, what's with that stupid baseball cap?

My thoughts on America two years ago today.

(Actually, from this journal, February 29, 2024, Leap Day!)

The State of the Union.  I'm trying to remember a time when America was more riven by factionalism, Left v. Right, Democrat v. Republican, Red State v. Blue State, neighbor v. neighbor, family member v. family member. Evangelicals v. seculars, etc.  The only times that come close to our current era were the late 40s and 50s with the big Communist Scare (McCarthyism, John Birch Society, HUAC, black lists, bomb shelters and air raid drills in schools) and the mid and late 60s and early 70s with the Vietnam invasion, and the draft, civil rights demonstrations, the pill and the Sexual Revolution, and Watergate.  These were the times of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), ghost-written by L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley's brother-in-law, and None Dare Call It Treason (1964), written by the evangelical minister John A. Stormer.  Those were the days of my adolescence and young adulthood.  I feel shame in admitting that for a while I fell for all the right-wing propaganda that was all about.  I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was the era of the Warren Court from 1953 to 1969 including revolutionary cases like Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Miranda v. Arizona in 1966.  It was the era of the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965 with its seemingly revolutionary changes in liturgy, doctrines and practices, ecumenism and relations with Jews, and religious freedom.  They were heady times to be a working-class young guy born during FDR's New Deal and raised 'in the bosom of' the Church' during the turbulent, triumphalist days between the end of World War II and the debacle of Vietnam.  I went from naïvely voting for Goldwater in 1964 to returning from Vietnam less than 2 years later in a state of culture shock, feeling morally depressed, isolated, disillusioned, and at best skeptical or cynical about most political, social, and religious "isms."

Are the days we are living in worse than the 50s, 60s, and early 70s?  I think so.  I would be the last guy to refer to those earlier days as "the good old days."  They weren't good.  Americans were deeply polarized then over civil rights, racism, military adventurism, sexual mores, religion, and certainly politics.  But I never felt the country was "coming apart at the seams" as I do now.  I never felt that Richard Nixon Gerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, or either of the Bushes was a fascist, intent on fundamentally changing the nature or structure of the American government toward one-party rule or dictatorship.  I never thought that my conservative Republican colleagues on the law faculty at Marquette were fascists.  Even during the days of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Sterling Hall Math Center bombing in Madison, I never felt we were on the verge of widespread violent attacks on agents, organs, and instrumentalities of democratic government.  I never thought that the leaders of the Republican Party, or their supporters, were mentally deranged and evil.  Although I thought that the values and policies of the Republicans were mistaken, selfish, or even dangerous, I didn't think that Republicans were actually delusional, unable to distinguish reality from imaginings, and unable to surrender false beliefs despite overwhelming evidence disproving those beliefs.  Donald Trump is deranged, mentally unbalanced and unhinged.  There is every reason to believe he is a sociopath with a narcissistic personality disorder.  He is a bad man, wicked, amoral and immoral, depraved and contemptible.  His millions of followers are delusional, insisting that Trump was cheated out of winning the 2020 election despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Many of his followers are disposed to believe whacko conspiracy theories spread by QAnon and others.  And they are well-armed, some of them organized into quasi-military militias.  They believe the apocalyptic rhetoric spouted by Trump and others about Americans being at risk of 'losing your country' to "the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."  With the country awash in lethal weapons, including assault weapons, most of them probably owned by 2nd Amendment gun nuts, we are all in trouble worse than we ever were during the turbulent days of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s.  Or am I the delusional one, the paranoid one?

I confess these thoughts were triggered by the decision of the Supreme Court to review the decision of the D.C. Circuit Court rejecting Trump's claim of immunity.  As a practical matter, the Court's action almost certainly means Trump's trial in Judge Tanya Chutkan's court for the attempted coup will not occur before the November presidential election.  The public will not learn of all the evidence the Special Counsel has amassed.  Was that the Republican Court's purpose in taking the case and in delaying the argument until sometime in the week of April 22?  Can there be any doubt?  In law, In tort an individual is considered to intend the consequences of an act—whether or not she or he actually intends those consequences. 

2/27/2026

 Friday, February 27, 026

1933 Nazi Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, was destroyed by fire, possibly set by the Nazis, who blamed and executed Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe

1962 South Vietnam President Ngô Đình Diệm's palace was bombed by dissident air pilots in a failed assassination attempt

1968 Walter Cronkite delivered a scathing editorial on America's chances of winning in Vietnam 

1973 American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota

2014 Unmarked Russia special forces invaded neighboring Crimea, Ukraine to assist pro-Russian nationalists, occupying government buildings in preparation for annexation

2025  The Trump administration banned NASA scientists and US government officials from attending the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference that started this week in Hangzhou, China, which are focused on the seventh IPCC Assessment Report on climate change. 

In bed at 10, awake at 2:30, up at 3:00.   32/22/53/31.  03"10  207.2  124/68/59  94.

Morning meds and 6th half-dose of Bisoprolol at 7 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 10 a.m.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency, an article in this morning's Washington Post by Isaac Arnsdorf.  Excerpts:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly previewed a plan to mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November’s midterm elections, and the activists expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue. The White House declined to elaborate on Trump’s plans.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” said Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who is advocating for the draft executive order. Ticktin attended the New York Military Academy with Trump and was part of his legal team that filed an unsuccessful 2022 lawsuit accusing Democrats of conspiring to damage him with allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.

“But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin went on. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

The emergency would empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference, Ticktin argued.

The idea of claiming emergency executive powers based on allegations of foreign interference attaches new significance to the administration’s actions to reinvestigate the 2020 election. Trump has never accepted defeat, while never finding evidence of widespread fraud. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is leading a review of election security that officials said focuses on foreign influence.

A 2021 intelligence review concluded that China considered efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.

. . .

“I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future,” Trump said on social media Feb. 13. “I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order,” he added the same day. 

Sarah arrived this morning for a weekend visit, a first visit in months.  She returns in June. 

 

 

2/26/2026

Thursday, February 26, 2026

D+111

1935 RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) is first demonstrated in Daventry, England

1973 Triple Crown horse Secretariat was bought for a record $5.7m

2023 One of the most violent incidents of revenge by mobs of Israeli settlers, who burned 200 buildings in Palestinian villages and killed at least one person after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis in the northern West Bank

2025 First death from measles in the US occurred in Texas in a decade, and the first child to die in 22 years amid an outbreak affecting 124 people 

e4r

In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, moved to LZB till up at 3:30.  18/39/16.

Morning meds and 5th half-dose of heart med at  10:30 a.m.  

Whatever happened to the accusations of Trump's BJ and the assault on the teenagers who bit his schwantz?  Have non-governmental investigators now surfaced 'the smoking gun'?  Not of the truth of the charges of Trump's participation in a sexual assault on one of Jeffrey Epstein's underage harem, but of the FBI and DOJ illlegal coverup of the fact of the accusation?  And of Attorney General Pam Bondi's perjury when she testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the government files contain no "evidence" of criminal behavior by Trump.  I am reminded of the tension I and the rest of the nation felt back in the Spring and Summer of 1974 as the noose tightened around Nixon's presidency.   It took more than two years from the time of the first Woodward and Bernstein article about the Watergate burglars' connection to the Nixon White House and the Committee to RE-Elect the President before Nixon resigned in August, 1974.  We can't expect Trump to resign of course, but God only knows where this evidence of a criminal blowjob may lead.  Hold on to your seat.  Meanwhile we can enjoy the thought of a brave young teenager biting the Big Prick's prick.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

My journal/blog entries last year on this date:

Browsing Facebook this morning, I see JPG's regular sunrise photo taken with her trusty iPhone.  Sarah Smarsh, a crush bunny for years, announced that she is leaving social media for a year to concentrate on writing a book she has committed to writing.  Her post referred to her writing as "an act of resistance against political and corporate forces that seek to siphon our lifeblood for their profit."  She attached an article on the significance of the U. S Postal Service to rural Americans and adds"As with public schools and every other struggling component of our government system, the main issue behind its struggles is intentional underfunding and onerous burdens devised by those who profit from privatization."  In another post, Heather Cox Richardson quotes Pete Buttigieg: "A defining policy battle is about to come to a head in this country. The Republican budget will force everyone—especially Congress and the White House—to make plain whether they are prepared to harm the rest of us in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest.”  He was referring to the upcoming Budget Bill and the basic differences between Democrats and Republicans over (1) how to raise money to support government programs and (2) what to spend the money on.  Richardson notes that "Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt."  Richardson went on to explain, as she does so well, what exactly is going on in Congress over the Budget Bill, and how the Republicans proposed to fund the tax cuts for the wealthy by cuts to (1) Medicare and Medicaid, and (2) food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  It is hard for me to believe what is going on in America now, but it shouldn't be.  For years, we have been unwilling to tax ourselves at sufficiently high rates to pay the nation's bills with only a sustainable level of annual deficits and national debt. Joe Scarborough in one of his morning rants accurately points out that from the founding of the American Republic until 2001, over those 220 years, the United States accumulated $5 trillion in debt.  In the last 20+ years, we have accumulated up to $36 trillion.  The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells us that if the Republicans pass what they are proposing to pass, the debt is going to increase another $23 trillion over the next decade.  Scarborough says, accurately, "We are in meltdown mode."  He points out that we spend more money on interest on our national debt than we do on the defense budget, which is the highest war budget in the world.  THIS IS MADNESS.  What kind of world are we leaving our children, grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren?  If Congress and Trump follow through on this budget, America will be less great, less secure, less wealthy, and less healthy - all the "MAGAs" upside down.  More rural hospitals will shut down.  More elderly people will be tossed out of nursing homes while Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Trump will be wealthier and probably living on their massive yachts in offshore Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or perhaps in penthouses in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

Russian asset or Russian agent?  I've asked this question before about Donald Trump.  In Thomas Friedman's column today, we find this: 

The drama going on between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine raises one of the most disturbing questions I’ve ever had to ask about my own country: Are we being led by a dupe for Vladimir Putin — by someone ready to swallow whole the Russian president’s warped view of who started the war in Ukraine and how it must end? Or are we being led by a Mafia godfather, looking to carve up territory with Russia the way the heads of crime families operate? “I’ll take Greenland, and you can take Crimea. I’ll take Panama, and you can have the oil in the Arctic. And we’ll split the rare earths of Ukraine. It’s only fair.”

Either way, my fellow Americans and our friends abroad, for the next four years at least, the America you knew is over. The bedrock values, allies and truths America could always be counted upon to defend are now all in doubt — or for sale. Trump is not just thinking out of the box. He is thinking without a box, without any fidelity to truth or norms that animated America in the past.

. . .

[There's] a benign interpretation of Trump — that he is just besotted with Putin, Russia’s Christian nationalist, anti-woke crusader, and not applying the common sense that he promised. But then there is also another explanation: Trump does not see American power as the cavalry coming to rescue the weak seeking freedom from those out to quash them; he sees America as coming to shake down the weak. He’s running a protection racket.  

The American and world common weal gets only worse with each day Trump and his gang of mobsters remain in office.

2/25/2026

 Wednesday, February 25, 2026

1932 Austrian immigrant Adolf Hitler obtained German citizenship

1994 Israeli extremist Baruch Goldstein massacred at least 55 Palestinians at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, with an assault  rifle

2024 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died fighting in the two years since Russia invaded

2025  Ukrainian Justice Minister Olha Stefanishyna announces that Ukraine has reached a deal with the United States on mineral resources. (Kyiv Independent)

2025  Federal judge  temporarily blocked Trump's executive order suspending the Refugee Admissions Program, ruling that President Trump cannot nullify the law passed by Congress

In be at 9 during Trump's SOTU rant, up at 6,  22/4/29/19  Sunny, windy again.  Sick of freezing temperatures and wind.  Lebanese neighbor Ghasson out, as always, walking his bull mastiff Athena, at 6:45, Ghasson all bundled up, Athena with no protection.  How do they do it?

Morning meds and 4th half-dose of Bisoprolol fumarate at  10:30 a.m.

Out of sorts much of today, innards and back.

2/24/2026

 Monday, February 24, 2026

1208 Francis of Assisi, 26, is said to have received his vocation in the Portiuncula

1803 US Supreme Court 1st ruled a law unconstitutional (Marbury v Madison)

1977 President Jimmy Carter announced US foreign aid would consider human rights

2022  Russia invaded Ukraine

2025  The United Nations General Assembly votes 93–18, with 65 abstentions, to pass a resolution condemning Russia's war against Ukraine. The 18 countries that voted against include the United States, Russia, Israel, Belarus, and North Korea. 

2025  Texas placed several major cities in the state on high alert due to a measles outbreak that spread to 99 people in Texas and New Mexico, the third-largest outbreak since it was considered eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

In bed at 8:45, awake at 4:35, up at at 4:50.  22/8/36/17.  SSW 192° wind at 11 mph, gusts to 25 mph.  Sunny, windy, cold.

Morning meds and 3rd half-dose of Bisopolol at 9 a.m.

Much to write about today, but side-tracked by news of Trump cover-up.

Visit with Dr. Patel.  I saw Dr. Patel, a VA psychiatrist, for the third time this morning while Geri was representing the two of us at Richard Goldberg's burial service.

The artist at the VA yesterday.    

Finished The Last Sweet Mile.

NPR disclosure re DOJ non-disclosure: Cover up.

From 2 years ago today:

"I'm grateful that I was able to write a memoir about my first 30 or so years of life and that I had and have access to so many other memoirs and other histories of various experiences in my life.  I'm grateful that at some time somehow I came to derive some pleasure or satisfaction from writing, (or is it a need to write?).  When did this occur?  Not in high school or college, for I don't recall ever taking pleasure in writing an academically-required essay or report.  I suspect it started during my last year in the Marines at NAS Willow Grove when I had among my ancillary duties the job of Public Information Officer and I became familiar with Fowler's Modern English Usage, Follett's Modern American Usage, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and a NYT newsletter that collected misusages from the newspaper that got past the copy editors.  After that, I found out in law school that I was pretty good at writing those 3-hour essay exams that were then de rigueur.  On top of that, I was Lead Article Editor and then Editor-in-Chief of the law review and had a job as the editorial assistant for two faculty-edited (really edited by me) commercial law publications.  In the following year, as a new faculty member, I was the Legal Writing professor for about 120 1L law students, a cruel and exploitative assignment but one that made me an expert on how poorly many, perhaps most, college graduates write.  In any case, over those 5 years, from 1966 to 1971, I became a frequent and usually careful writer.  And of course, as a faculty member and later as a practicing lawyer, I did a lot of writing.  I relied on my good friend and law office colleague, David Branch, to edit some of my work and found out from him that I was (and still am) wordy.  I use too many words to say things that can be said more concisely.  His edits were always correct and useful, and I usually accepted them but often opted to stick with my wordy excesses simply because it was the way I expressed myself then and still do, with lots of surplusage.  Plus, in writing these daily journal entries that I know will be read by no one but me, I easily fall into run-on sentences, inappropriate hyphenation and capitalization, misplaced modifiers, and awkward constructions.  David Branch's red pencils would need frequent sharpening for editing of my daily musings.

    What prompted these reflections was reading Hillary Kelly's review of the several memoirs of Diana Athill  in the 2/21/2024 New Yorker titled "A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing."  I especially enjoyed this quote about old age from one of Athill's late-life memoirs:

We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so.  We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.

It made me wonder, only momentarily, whether my "general pessimism about life" is just attributable to my old age rather than to real conditions in the U.S. and in the world.  I don't think so since there appear to be so many much younger people who share my pessimism."

2/23/2026

Monday, February 23, 2026

1945 US Marines raised the flag of the United States on top of Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Joe Rosenthal later becomes iconic, inspiring the Marine Corps War Memorial sculpture

1954 First mass inoculation against polio with the Jonas Salk vaccine took place at Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1967 Noam Chomsky's anti-Vietnam war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" was published by the New York Review of Books

1971 US Army officer William Calley confessed & implicated Captain Medina during his trial for the My Lai Massacre

2025  The Israel Defense Forces deploy tanks into the West Bank for the first time since 2002, declaring that the 40,000 Palestinians who fled refugee camps in the region cannot return

In bed at 9, awake at 4:15, and up at 4:35.  19/-1/25/18.  The wind blows at 18 mph from 345° NNW, with gusts up to 31 mph.

Morning meds and 2nd half-dose of Bisoprolol heart med at 7:15 a.m.

Jesus of Nazareth, Francis of Assisi, Theo of Golden, and the Levi Boys of Hamilton, GA.  There is a story in this morning's New York Times about the supposed bones of Francis of Assisi, now on public display at the large basilica erected in his name in the hilltop town of Assisi in Umbria, which Geri and I visited more than 20 years ago.  Francis has long been my favorite Catholic saint, though I've never quite been sure why.  He was certainly a wierdo by today's standards, and probably by any standards.  He had a great and deep belief in God, the God of the Catholic Church, the church of Jesus.  He also had a great and deep love of the natural world as God's creation, the world he depicted in his Canticle of the Sun.  Like Jesus, he also lived a life of austerity, indeed seemingly more austere than Jesus, who attended weddings and ate with sinners.  But as I read Allen Levi's memoir The Last Sweet Mile, I was mindful that both the author and his brother, Gary, a model we are told for Theo of Golden, were lifelong bachelors, like Francis and (supposedly) Jesus.  Also, all 4 of them were great and deep believers in God.  It's not clear, to me at least, what kind of God Jesus himself believed in, but his followers, Francis, Allen, and Gary, believed in a Christian God.  What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that none of these guys ever married?  Personally, I have also harbored a suspicion that Jesus was married before he started his 'public life' around age 30, and that his wife died, perhaps in childbirth.  All Jewish men of his era were expected to marry, to go forth and multiply.  Just as a matter of social probabilities, it is surely more probable than not that Jesus was married long before his 30th year.  If so, why did he never remarry?  Why did Francis, the son of a wealthy textile merchant, never marry?  Why did both Allen and Gary  Levi never marry, while their sisters did?  It seems to me to be a fair question, one worthy of some thought, and some stabs at possible answers.  No only did none of them ever marry; neither did any of them seem to have a girlfriend or a lover, at least none that is referred to in writings about them.  (Unless we consider a lot of speculation, unsupported by evidence, of Jesus's relationship with Mary Magdalene or 'the disciple whom Jesus loved.'[John 13:23, 19:26, and 20:1]).  If I recall correctly, in one of the chapters in Theo of Golden, Theo refers to a saying: "A man who loves all women, loves no woman.  A man who loves one woman, loves all women," or something like that.  Why is it that men who are held up as holiness incarnate and God-filled, like Jesus and Francis and Gary Levi have no room in their lives for a partnering woman?  Gay?  Incels?  So God-obsessed they leave no room for a partner?  Repelled or disgusted by sex?  Whazupwidat?  What are we to think of the Catholic Church's adherence to priestly celibacy???

2/22/2026

Sunday, February 22, 2026

D+107 

1300 Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull (decree) instating a Jubilee Year, granting forgiveness of sins and debts for those who fulfill various conditions

2014 Viktor Yanukovych was ousted as President of Ukraine by the parliament following the Euromaidan revolution

2021 US death toll from COVID-19 passed 500,000, higher than US deaths in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. 

In bed at 8:45, up at 5:50.  22/4/26/19.

Morning meds and  First day of half-dose Bisoprolol heart med at 10 a.m.

Last year on this date, I wrote:

The Habit of Writing.  While reading an old (2.26.2017) New Yorker article about Elizabeth Bishop's life, actually a then-new biography by Megan Marshall, “Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast,” I thought about how long I've been in the habit of writing.  For years after I reconciled with my father in 1995, I wrote him a letter every day.  I suppose I was trying to make up for lost time, but in any case, I didn't call him every day, or even frequently, but rather I wrote to him.  That practice stopped at some point before he came to live with us outside of Saukville in 2003 (?), but it continued for a long time.  Perhaps it was part of what made it possible for him to accept our invitation to live with us; the letters gave him a pretty good idea of our lives, what we did and didn't do, who our friends were, etc.  I don't remember when Kitty and I started having our daily early morning conversations by text messages (2013? 2014?) but those exchanges also involved daily writing down my experiences, thoughts, fears, concerns, etc,, ofter at some length, and we never missed starting each day with those written conversations every morning.  I even continued texting her after she died on March 3, 2022, knowing she was gone but being so habituated to starting each day by writing her that I continued.  I suppose it was that experience of starting each day tapping on the keyboard of my laptop that led me on July 29th or 30th of that year to pull up my old Blogspot blog and type "Am I still here?" and to discover that my blog still existed and provided a place write some thoughts each morning.  Two and a half years later, I'm still writing every morning, sometimes sensibly, sometimes not.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop  1911 –1979

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

I concluded the thoughts about my writing habit by copying Elizabeth Bishop's great poem, which reminded me of how bereft I was after Kitty's death.  On reflection, I also felt some of that when my Dad died.  The two of them were my connection with my origin, my connection with my mother, with our lives on Emerald Avenue, our lives after the Big War, where I came from and who I became, who I was and am.  I needed connection with each of them , with both of them, and was graced to have it with my Dad for the last 11 years of his life,  and with Kitty until she died three years ago, on March 3, 2026.  We were each other's best friend and  daily communicant, not in the Catholic sacramental sense, but perhaps in that sense too, sharing deep and abiding love and imparting Grace of that love to each other.  Deo gratias. 

Bits and snatches of The Last Sweet Mile:

Gathering: . . .  everyone seemed conscious of the gift it was to be with those people in that place at that moment. 

Song:  Somewhere he learned a saying that he often quoted:  "One does not learn of Christ or read the Bible for information but for transformation.

The latter bit reminded me of the lunch I had with my dear and saintly friend Vicki Conti, when she was working at the Medical College of Wisconsin.  In the course of the lunch, I got to grousing about the irrationality of some bit of Christianity, which Vicki listened to patiently, wisely, and to which she responded: "It's not a head thing, Chuck, it's a heart thing." 

What I'm learning from congestive heart failure:  how much salt adds to the taste of so many foods, and what the word "bland" means.

m