5/9/2026

 Saturday, May 9, 2026

39!

1987 Geraldine Aquavia wed Charles Clausen under the crab apple tree on the front lawn of Tom and Micaela St. John in Shorewood, Wisconsin

In bed at 10 after Bill Maher, up just before 8.  First pit stop at 3?!? PainQuilPM?!?  0810 135/66/58 202.6; 56/48/63/46. Partly cloudy.

Morning meds at 10 a.m., and half dose of Bisoprolol at  8:40 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 8 p.m.

Who's  the dipshit with that gorgeous woman? Looks like he can't believe it either!

I finished The Correspondent yesterday afternoon.  A few comments.  (1) I was a bit surprised that in the entire novel, there is only one brief comment about Donald Trump, though the novel  takes place entirely in the Trump Era.  In a footnote to one letter, Sybil said she was becoming a Democrat because of Donald Trump.  The fact that she switched her political allegiance because of Trump wasn't at all surprising, but that she made no further reference to him or to what was happening within the country,during his first regime/reign and his interregnum, is although it's clear the author did not want The Correspondent to become a political novel.  (2)  I'm a little bit surprised that more wasn't developed about Theodore Lubeck's parents' 'Sophie's Choice' in 1941 Germany.  (3) I was wondering whether there would be a happy ending to the story in term's of Sybil's death and blindness because of the letter she wrote to Larry McMurtry in which she praised his courage in ending Lonesome Dove tragically, unhappily.  It seemed like a forewarning of what was to come in The Correspondent, but no.. (4) Her relationship with her daughter Fiona inevitably reminded me of my relationship with my Dad as indeed her attitude about pessimism, never expecting so she wouldn't be disappointed, or devastated as she was by Gilbert's death, and never getting very close to other people, perhaps even 'the birds."  (5) I was pleased that she came to a better understanding of herself in her last years, which was made abundantly clear in her letters to Rosalie and Fiona acknowledging her deep-seated faults grounded in her guilt and defensiveness, and in her opening herself and her dependency to Theodore toward the end of her life.  She reminded me of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich.  (6) Lastly, I thought the closing letter to Daan, never completed and never sent, was brilliant, not on Sybil's part, but on the author's.  She never completed it because she couldn't.  She couldn't adequately understand herself what she was trying to have Daan understand.  She would try, and fail, and put the draft adie for another try, then try again, fail again, and again put the draft aside for another try and another failure, and eventually of course Daan died and then she died with things unsaid on both sides.  I was reminded of a message I sent to Anne on her last birthday in which, after appropriate and sincer birthday wishes and something about moving into the mid-80s, I told her that I was very sorry for every hurt I ever caused in her life and that I wanted her to know that.  It took quite a while before she responded, simply, 'Thank you,' but I'm sure many thoughts ran through her head, as they had through mine before I sent the apology.   I pause as I write these words now, on the 39th anniversary of my marriage with Geri, thinking Love and Marriage are not simple experiences, nor easy to understand, how it happens in the first place, nor how it unravels in the winds that blow into lives.  Sybil's draft letter to Daan, with all its uncompleted thoughts and sentences, and its cross-outs illustrates (and I use the term intentionally) how difficult, and maybe impossible, it may be to understand how and why we have lived our lives just the way we did.  I thought it was a brilliant and perfect ending to the story.

Spring is my favorite time of year for bird watching from my recliner, especially watching the birds who are grateful for the big cotton ball I hang to help them build their nests.  They always surprise me with the amount of cotton they stuff into their tiny beaks before flying away to stuff pieces of it into their nests.  The whole phenomonon of nest-building amazes me.  How do they do it, especially from the beginning starting with what, one twig?  A chunk of moss?  Whatever.  How do they get that initial structural component, or components, to stay in place while they go foraging for the next pieces?  How do they get the structures to be as sturdy as they are?  How do they find their way back to their nests with those huge wads of cotton seemingly blocking their vision?  How can anyone not be gobsmacked by the existence of birds and by what they can do, their resourcefulness? Alas, that we are killing them off by the millions, rendering whole species extinct.

Life moving on in my 80s.  One year ago today, I was recovering from cataract surgery the day before, wearing a patch on my right eye, and having trouble writing and typing.  Two years ago, I was out of commission with polymyalgia rheumatica pain.  Three years ago, I was daydreaming:

Pipe Dream.  Renting a cottage on the Eagle River chain of lakes, on a lake where loons and coots and eagles and ospreys live and living without the news: no online newspapers or magazines, no television, no cable, having my Lund Mr. Pike 16-foot fishing boat again.  Or spending time on Clam Lake or one of the nearby lakes like Ghost Lake where Sarah and I put in her kayak and my Mr. Pike years ago, middle of Chequamegon National Forest.  Ditto Cable Lake.  In my current condition, I wouldn't be able safely to get into or out of a fishing boat, and probably wouldn't do any fishing from a pier or bridge or the shore and I have to wonder if I would get sick of my own company.  In the pipe dream, I would do a lot of reading - novels, poetry, non-fiction, graphics - and watching DVDs.  I looked at rentals available in the Clam Lake area, Uppper and Lower Clam Lake, and got a little wistful remembering fishing with the Anzivinos for walleye on the lakes and in the Chippewa River at sundown, navigating the Chippewa with Andy on the bow of the boat with a flashlight, directing us away from boulders.  More fuzzy memories of fishing in a canoe with Ara Cherchian and capsizing in the river.  Many of the rental properties that appear on the internet are a far cry from the kind of places I used to stay in with the kids or the muskie crowd from Racine or the Anzivinos.  They are more like luxurious chalets with large windows and modern facilities, like John Price's family 'cottage' on Lake Huron.  It would simply require an exercise of will for me to go on a 'news fast and abstinence' right here at home but I doubt that I have the willpower to pull it off.   Habits developed over decades are pretty hard to jettison even for a day or two much less a week or two, but one can dream.  I'm reminded of an Andrews Sisters song I heard on the radio in my childhood.

I Can Dream, Can't I

I can see no matter how near you'll be / you'll never belong to me / but I can dream, can't I? . . .  I'm aware my heart is a sad affair / there's much disillusion there / but I can dream, can't I?

And Johnny Mercer's 1945 hit Dream, 

Dream / When you're feelin' blue / Dream / That's the thing to do / Just watch the smoke rings rise in the air / You'll find your share / Of memories there / So dream / When the day is through / Dream / And they might come true / Things never are as bad as they seem / So dream, dream, dream.

These were the kinds of popular songs we listened to in the 1940s and 50s, and that I danced to with my inamorata Charlene at the Melody Mill Ballroom in the North Riverside suburb west of Chicago, but I'm wandering a long way from Clam Lake. . .

Four years ago, May 9th, 2022, I had not yet started this journal/blog. I was still recovering (if that's the correct word) or adjusting to Kitty's death 2 months before, with the journal/blog commencement at the end of July to become a poor substitute for the long chats that Kitty and I shared every morning, until we didn't.

I have started and will soon finish the very short 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.  Geri got it at the library yesterday and read it in one day, probably in one sitting.  I asked her to let me read it before returning it to the library, which I now doing.  I love the exchanges involving trans-Atlantic purchases of fine used books for $1.85, $2, or $6.  It reminds me of my youth when one of my favorite activities in addition to listening to Elvis, Little Richard, or Jimmy Rodgers records, was to hop on a Halstead Street bus or streetcar to  64th Street where I caught the Englewood "El" to the Wabash Avenue, multi-storied,  used bookstores in downtown Chicago where I would spend hours browsing and making a few purchases of treasures to bring home on the "El."  I believe I often brought home a bag of books, grateful for the riches so inexpensively available in those stores.  How musty and dusty they were, and I felt like I had discovered El Dorado just a short distance from 73rd and Emerald Avenue.  A friend of the author who had visited the London bookshop wrote her: "It's dim inside.  you smell the shop before you see it, it's a lovely smell.  I can't articulate it easily, but it's a combination of must and dust age, and walls of wood and floors of wood." To which I say 'Yes."  The references to food rationing n the UK reminded me of finding my parents' WWII ration book on top of a cabinet in our tiny basement kitchen when I was a boy.  Most food rationing here ended by the end of the war in 1945, but sugar rationing continued until 1947, when I was in the first grade at St. Leo Grade School.  I finished the book this afternoon.

I followed Geri's encouragement to sit out on our patio this afternoon.  I dearly love sitting out there and simply looking at space in front of me, Geri's marginal garden, the many tall trees hehind it along the border between our property and our neilghbor's, the Callery pear tree next to the patio with its two sets of wind chimes and plants around its trunk, all the Virginia Bluebells in bloom at this time of year, the sky and clouds above me, and the occasional squirrel, chipmunk, or bird movint through.  The temperature was in the mid-60s and I was sitting in the partial sun with only a slight breeze but I had to go back inside and put on a sweatshirt to stay warm.  Meanwhile, Geri was out weeding weaaring only her jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt and was perfectly comfortable.  After sitting outside for only a short time and reading the last pages of 84, Charing Cross Road, my continuous glucose monitor alerted me that I was experiencing low glucose, in the 60s, and I  repaired to the house to stuff myself with some dark chocolate treats and get my glucose out of the danger range.  The photo illustrates how Geri stays warm in just her T-shirt while I'm cold in my sweatshirt: She works, I sit.

Anniversary dinner was lamb chops, a baked potato, and beets.  I tried but failed to persuade Geri to go out for an anniversary dinner and some expensive steak.

Low glucose alarm.  I'm experiencing several.many low glucose warnings from my CGM, despite eating Dove's Dark Chocolate Mints and many grapes.  I've learned that chocolate is not the thing to take in these circumstances because its high fat cotent slows down the digestion of its glucose, so lesson learned, but I'm still surprised by my body's wanting to return to low a low glucose state.

5/8/2026

 Friday, May 8, 2026

1945 German General Wilhelm Keitel formally surrendered to the Allies in Berlin

1957 South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm, arrived in the U.S. on a state visit

1958 President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard out of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas

1967 Muhammad Ali was indicted for refusing induction into the US Army

1970 Thousands of students protested against the Vietnam War following the Kent State University shootings in Ohio

2024 New York has more millionaires than any other city in the world, one in 24, with 744 centi-millionaires worth more than 100 million and 60 billionaires

2025 The father of Natalie Rupnow, the perpetrator of the shooting that killed three people, including herself, and injured six others at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin,in December 2024, is charged with felonies in connection with the shooting

2025 Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States is elected to the papacy on the fourth ballot and takes the name Leo XIV. 

In bed at 9, but received a text message from Caela at 9:15 responding to one I sent at 4:4 about oranges for orioles and couldn't fall asleep.  I got up a little before 1 and moved to the TV room until 3 when I went back to bed and slept until 5:45; 0555 147/87/55 129 203.2; 38/63/34, sunny morning & partly cloudy afternoon

Morning meds at a.m., and half dose of Bisoprolol at 6:40 a.m. Missed my Trulicity injection.

FB posting today:

Unca Donald's folly.  The war against Iran has turned into a fiasco, not just a failure and a loss, but a ludicrous, ridiculous, and humiliating failure and loss.  Our 'excursion', 'blip', ''little skirmish', special military operation', or whatever  word we want to use rather than the accurate one -war, - has been from the beginning B'rer Donald's tar baby.  He can't get rid of it and it is making him and us more vulnerable and less powerful at home and all over the world.  When the Iranians fired missiles at two Navy destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, the devastating (and appropriate) American response along Iran's coastal military facilities was almost dismissed by Trump as "a love tap" and not a violation of or end of the 'ceasefire.'  Both Donald Duck and Donald Trump are arrogant, impatient, and immature creatures of sometimes middling but more often, low intelligence who often act impulsively and without much care or pre-analysis.    Both are cartoon characters, but unfortunately, only one is fictional.  One had his Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the other his J.D., Pete, and Kash.  One had his Daisy, the other his Pam and Kristi.  One had his uncle Scrooge McDuck as a role model, the other had his father Fred Trump.  When one was frustrated when he couldn't solve a probelm he had created himself, he would say "This is exasthsperatin'!", the other would say, "There is no problem."  I prefer Disney's Donald to America's/

I'm close to finishing The Correspondent, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit, although 'enjoying' seems an odd word for reading about so manies of the miseries that Life throws at people.  I'm thinking of the bullying that Harry Landy and Felix Stone experienced, Harry's suicide attempt, Rosalie's husband's need to be moved to a nursing home, "DM"s hatred for Sybil and Judge Whatsizname, Sybil's near-estrangement from her dauhter Fiona, etc.  Also, we started out with some letters written in 2012 and now we're into the Spring of 2017 and there has so far been only one glancing reference to Donald Trump!  Sybil was a woman of the world as a lawyer and then chief clerk to her Superior Court judge, a graduate of UVA Law, and highly intelligent.  Trump's campaign in 2015 and 2016, and his election that Fall were cataclysmic events in the U.S. and the world, but only one glancing reference to the man from someone who is so communicative and outgoing?   Perhaps that omission is about to be cured, or perhaps the author didn't want to get into the Trump weeds with her potential readership.  In any event, I think the reason I'm enjoying the book as much as I am is because of how it treats the many hard knocks that her characters, young and old, have to deal with in their lives, especially those experienced by the oldsters, like Sybil's blindness, her struggle with identity and origens, and with the death of her child Gill, her incapability of attending Daan's funeral and her absence's effect on her daughter Fiona, her broken wrist and sprained ankle, her regrets.  I suppose this kind of stuff is grist for the mill of all novels, but in any case, I'm enjoying reading this one.  One of the things about the narrative that I find interesting is the number of "double relationships" (for want of a better term) there are, like the relationship between Sybil and Rosalie and Rosalie and Fiona and Sybil and Finona, and the relationship between Sybil and Harry and Sybil and Harry's dad, and between Harry and his dad.  There's even the relationship between Sybil and his brother Felix, Felix's relationship with his lover/partner Stewart, and Stewart's relationship with Sybil, or at least his attempt to use Sybil to gain contanct with Felix.  Rosalie kept information about Fiona from Sybil, Sybil kept information about Harry from Harry's dad,  and information about Felix from Stewart..  Sybil castigated Rosalie for BETRAYAL of their relationship, but was comfortable to serve as a confidante in other relationships.  I daresay it's true that both Geri and I are great respecters of confidences, even with or from each other and it has on rare occasions led to some peculiar situations which, to respect confidences, I don't get into here.😐

    Perhaps the reason (or one of the reasons) I like this novel as much as I do is reflected in a sentence in a letter Sybil sent to Larry McMurtry: "I am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane."  I am an old man and my life, like  all or almost all lives, has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.  I find it easy to relate to Sybil, though I'm not sure I like her very much.  I've said it and written it so often as to turn it into a cliché, that we are surrounded by saints, and heroes, and miracles - things marveloous, wondrous to behold, to see and experience.  The world is full of beauty and goodness yet we get so focused on the mundane that we miss the miraculous.  To accompany these thoughts, I looked for but couldn't find my photograph of the exquisite little mushroom I saw by happenstance or serendiptiy 4 or 5 years ago in the lawn near our mailbox.  Exquisite.  Inexpressibly beautiful.  I find such beautiful things all over the place and all the time, unless that is I am beset by the mundane.  Not that what besets me is itself mundane, but my internal mundanity hides its beauty and extraordinaariness from my consciousness.   I'm not expressing my though very well.  I'm like some of my students from my teaching days who would tell me that they understood some legal concept but they just couldn't express it very well.  I would suggest to them that they shouldn't be so sure that they understood the concept until they could express it in words.  I need to do better.

5/7/2026

 Thursday, May 7, 2026

1824 Beethoven's 9th (Choral) Symphony premier in Vienna, Austria

1945 Unconditional surrender of the German Third Reich to the Allies was signed by General Alfred Jodl at Reims in northern France

1975 US President Gerald Ford declared an end to the "Vietnam Era."

1984 $180m out-of-court settlement was reached in the Agent Orange suit

2020 Father and son were arrested for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, after video of the killing surfaced

2025 133 cardinals began the process of electing a new pope following the death of Pope Francis

In bed at 9:30, and up at 4:20; 0500 149/66/31 121 205.2; 34/28/52/34, sunny early, then a cloudy day, Frost advisory

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m., and Bisoprolol at 5:35 a.m.

Back in town and at our feeders this morning

I'm only a quarter of the way into The Correspondent, and it is already triggering a host of thoughts, memories, and sensitivities in me.  While resting before turning on my blood pressure device this morning, I read Sybil's Christmas 2013 letter to her brother Felix in which she tells him that her son Bruce gave her as a Christmas present a program to analyze her DNA and tell her about her origins.  Since her childhood, she has known she was adopted at age 14 months.  Unlike brother Felix, she has never tried to discover the identities of her birth parents and the circumstances that led to the adoption.  It is very clear, however, that she is sensitive about it, very sensitive.  She wrote to Felix that

. . . I am not like you.  I have been content. (Of course it occurs to me from time to time, at odd times really, like a little bruise, why would someone give up a child?  A newborn I can certainly understand.  A thing someone decided before the notion of a baby became an actural baby.  But a child of fourteen months, what could possess a person to do that?  These are thoughts that I've had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I'd press on every once in a while.

She doth protest too much, for later in the letter she wrote

Perhaps they want to know, for their own sakes, now with their father at death's door.  Sentimentality? Half Belgian elite, half WHO THE HELL KNOW, PROBABLY TRAILER TRASH. I'm embarassed to admit this, but I was doing my best to held back tears.  I was angry, on display like a fool!  I'm very close to the end of my life, Felix, almost there, and I don't want to muck it up more than I already have.  I do not want to know.  I am perfectly content.

In a later letter to a Customer Service rep at the DNA service, she says "I have decided to send in my spit to see what kind of a mutt I am." 

I am wondering why she says, at age 73, that she is very close to the end of her life and sympathetic to her wish "not to muck it up more than I already have."  In any event, though, it seems clear that she is not 'perfectly content.'

I am reminded of course of my nephew Michael who was adopted by my sister Kitty and her husband Jim through Catholic Charities in Cook County so many years ago.  He was told that he was adopted when he was a child and, at least up to the time of Kitty's death 3 years ago, he never took steps to learn of his birth parents, always professing that Kitty and Jim were all the parents he wanted or needed.  Whether that remained the case, I don't know.  But I was also reminded of Kitty and me both wondering, when we were children, whether we were really our father's child - wondering how he could really be our father and yet so very unloving of us, so rejecting.  It wasn't until we were both in old age and starting each day chatting with each other that we shared with our childhood doubts about our paternity.  I thought only I had the doubt and she thought only she did.

I was also struck by Sybil's not wanting to muck up her life more than she already had.  What a lot of regret seems to be packed into that thought and, at almost age 85, I certainly 'relate to' that.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

 I'm reminded of the man leaving Sendik's in front of me awhile back with the T-shirt that reminded me: Every person you encounter is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

The deeper I get into her correspondence, the more Sybil reminds me of my former partner, Anne, who in turn reminds me a bit of Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's speech writer and now my favorite Wall Street Street Journal columnistl. Both are very bright woman, wordsmiths, personally accomplished, highly organized in their thinking and in their lives,  sometimes prickly, with at least a hint of well-deserved  superciliousness about them, but like all the rest of us referred to on that T-shirt at Sendik's, each surely fighting battles we know nothing about.  Sybil has two female long-term friends, Trudy and Millie, whom she calls 'the birds', reminding me of Anne and her long-term buddies who refer to themselves as "the three Graces."😊

Another passage in the book that caught my attention and resonated (ugh!) with me was in a letter Sybil wrote to a high school student who had interviewed her for a school assignment.  The student was surprised that Sybil had her collection of years of correspondence with all sorts of people whereas the student said she had never written a letter and wouldn't know how to write one, or to whom, or what to say, etc.  Among her responses, Sybil wrote: "An email can in no way replace a written letter.  It does concern me that one day all the advancement of technology will do away with the post, but I hope to be dead and gove long before that."  It reminded me the day of the handwritten, personal letter from one human being to another is perhaps (or probably) already gone.  I wrote (actually, printed) a 2 page letter to my grandson Peter yesterday forwarding a birthday gift to him.  I'm waiting for Andy to deliver it to him probably tomorrow when Peter comes home for his dormitory.  I handwrote another longer letter to him on the occasion of his religious confirmation, but I suspect they may the only somewhat lengthy, handwriten letters that he ever receives, something thought out, more than just a note inside a Hallmark card.  And, how often did Jimmy Aquavia and I share the view that we were glad we would be dead before certain "progreses" occur, progress like driveless vehicles, and artifical intelligence generally.  Is this journal I've kept now for almost 4 full years just a form of writing letters to myself?  A lonely old guy talking to himself now that he's outlived most of his family and best friends?

I watched a short interview of Fran Liebowitz on YouTube the other day.  In it, she described Donald Trump as having such having such a degree of "moral squalor" that even his fellow New York land developers look down on him.  I recall my brother-in-law Jim Aquavia, who spent almost his entire career structuring high-value real estate investments for Prudential Life Insurance Company, saying that no insurance company would do business with Trump.  I  had these thoughts when I read my comments on this journal/blog a year ago:

Boor, lout, thug, brute, lummox, pig, moron, vulgarian, sadist, charlatan, rapist, conman, fraudster, fascist,  lowlife, liar, pagan, narcissistic, avaricious, and seditious,    What a wealth of words there is to describe the curent president of the United States of America.  I thought of what a vile, despicable human being he is as I watched his Oval Office Q and session with Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, yesterday.  Trump has had the office redecorated with a lot of gold features on the walls and the fireplace.  He has given the room a cheesy, over-the-top, Mar-a-Lago look.  His former chief of staff, John Kelly, said of him: "The depths of his dishonesty just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else.  He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”   He also called him "unhinged." Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state, called him "a moron."  James Mattis, his first secretary of defense, said he has "the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader."  Other former high-ranking aides are reported to have called him "an idiot" and "like an 11-year-old."  But it's not so much his IQ that is a national embarrassment as it is his moral character and boorishness. his churlishness, his uncouthness, his classlessness and vulgarity, his lack of decency and respectability.  As I watched him seated next to Mark Carney yesterday, I envied the Canadians for having a political leader and head of state with class and dignity, unlike ours.  

 

 

Text to CBG: 

Hi, Sweetie.  I’ve been thinking this morning about how you have gotten me back into reading books again and how grateful I am for that.  I’m into “The Correspondent” now and finding that it’s triggering the same kinds of reflections I had reading Theo of Golden.  I suspect you’ve already read it but if not, I think you would find it interesting.  Saturday will be our 39th anniversary which has me marveling that Geri and I have spent the last half of our long lives together.  Sunday will be a big day for you and her both and I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day.  I’m scheduled for a catheter ablation at the VA hospital on 6/15 which has me more than a little anxious, but otherwise I’m reading up a storm and feeling pretty good. I hope all is well with you and Dan and your wonderful family.❤️. 

 

A year ago today I wrote the following in this journal: "I can't remember the last book I read cover to cover.  I get mooks but only read parts of them.   Part of it is old age and lackl of energy to engage in close reading, maybe lack of interst too.  A small part of it may be my difficulty reading, which I hope will be cured by my cataract surgery on Friday."  Actually, a lot of my problem was my difficulty reading and it was helped a lot by the cataract surgery.  Also I was only reading heavy nonfiction, like Yeshua Liebowitz and Reinhold Niebuhr.  Since Caren led me to read and discuss Theo of Golden, I've read not only that, but that author's memoir about his brother, The Idiot and Notes from Underground by Dostoevski, This is Happiness by Niall Williams, The Solace of Empty Spaces by Gretel Ehrich, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, A Portrait of the Artish as a Young Man by James Joyce, and now The Correspondent.   Part of this resurgence of reading is attributable to using Kindle with Audible.  When my eyes lose focus, I listen instead of reading.  The listening experience reminds me of listening to the radio when I was a kid.  Of course, if I limit myself to books on Kindle with Audible, I'll be eschewing a ton of good books, but one step at a time.

I replaced the seed cakes this afternoon and put out 2 orange halves, hoping to attract more orioles and other migrators.  The white-crowned sparrows showed up right away, but on the ground, as usual, along with a very dark brouwn, heavily-striped bird of unidentifiable species - finch, sparrow, siskin???  Actually, I think it's a female rose-breasted grosbeak.  And, SUCCESS! The oriole is back, feasting on the orange in the tray feeder.  The rose-breasted grosbeak has also returned.

It's an odd but wonderful time of year here.  I looked down the street as I returned to the house after doing my bird feeder chores and noticed what a beautiful vista was before me, a buenavista.  I mean the trees in our block.  some are now in blossom while others are leafing out and yet others have hardly begun, but they are all beautfiul.  I'm often sturck by the beauty of the the trees all around us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5/6/2026

 Wednesday, May 6, 2026

2001 During a trip to Syria, Pope John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque

2025 The Bundestag elects Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, as the 10th Chancellor of Germany in the second round of voting, with 325 votes out of the 316 votes necessary.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:30; 0545 134/59/32 119 203.6; 38/50/35, sunny early, then cloudy.

Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.,with my banana bread, and a half dose of Bisoprolol at 6:20 a.m.  

Warm weather visitors: White-crowned and White-throated sparrows

I'm reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans on Kindle.  When I mentioned this to Geri last night, she told me that she was reading The Correspondent on Kindle.  If she had known I was interested, we could have 'family shared' her copy.  I sheepishly failed to add that I had purchased the Audible add-on, which I have come to really enjoy, not as a sole or primary way of getting through Kindle books, but as a very welcome supplement.  I feel a little bad about wasting some money on the second copy of the novel, but when I think of the money we spent on cigarettes in our smoking days and I spent on Zinfandel and gewurztraminer in my drinking days, I get over it quickly.  It turns out that both Geri and I are big fans of epistolary novels, though we can't claim to have read many because there aren't that many to be read.  I became a fan from during my 'monster reading' phase of life when I read RLS's Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, (1886),Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, (1818), and notably, Bram Stoker's epistolary Dracula (1897).  It followed my heroic saga phase when I read Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, The Nibelungenlied, and The Iliad.  Geri became a fan from reading and seeing the film 84 Charing Cross Road, which I also saw but did not read.  I also read and enjoyed C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (1942), a series of letters from the senior devil Screwtape to his junior tempter Wormwood.  Just thinking about these past reading pleasures makes me want to read them again.  

Back to The Correspondent, I'm only about 10% into the novel so far but I'm enjoying it greatly.  It reminds me of a period in my life after the 13 years during which my father and I never spoke to each other or saw each other when we reconnected, and I wrote him a letter every single day and flew or drove down to Florida to visit him 4 times a year.  I suppose the daily letter-writing was a crazy thing to do, just as our not speaking to each other for 13 years was a crazy thing to do, but we were clearly crazy men, or I suppose more accurately, deeply-injured men for years.  Eventually of course I persuaded him to leave his lonely life in Floriday and come to live with us in Wisconsin and with Kitty and Jim in Arizona so we enjoyed a few years of daily togetherness until he died at age 86 in 2007.

Again, back to The Correspondent,  I just finished a letter that  Sybil Van Antwerp wrote to Joan Didion on November 14, 2012, about the death of Sybil's son Gilbert 39  yearss before at age 8 and that includes this:

There is an articulation of life one hears again and again.  People will say, 'oh, this is only a season.' You know what I am referring to, don't you?  I mean how if someone is in difficulty they'll say 'it's only a season.'  Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season -- a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!) -- and the season will change eventually to something sunnier.  I take issue with this.  There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year.  As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round.  We are born and grow through childhood in spring.  We live those glorious, lively, intreting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer.  We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic.  And in winter we age (brutally) and die.  One turn of the seasons per person, unless it's cut short, like it was for Gill . . .  I suppose, on this schedule, we'd say your John had made it to Fall.  My mother died in her summer.

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction.  By and large a lonesome walk out in the wilderness of hills and wind.  Mountains. Snow. And soetimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.  Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years.  I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn't know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt. . . . [M[y point is I tire of people speaking of season as if you can count on three months of winter turning out three months of summer on repeat.  It's not so.  The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, . . . .

I was struck by her metaphors comparing our lives from birth to death to the four meteorological seasons and a long walk in one direction with only occasional comforting stopovers.  At age 73, she sees herself in the winter of her life when "we age (brutally) and die."  We learned in an earlier letter that she is losing her eyesight and that, just as the novel began, she had a temporary "black out" that caused her to crash and total her Cadillac.  This view of herself explains in large part her prickly, not-very-pleasant view of life.  She's not a terribly likable person, to put it mildly.  She seems to have a pretty bleak view of life and especailly of old age, seeing no benefits to it offsetting its many detriments.  Is 'bitter' the right word for her, or is that too harsh?  I should find out as I read more.

I was particularly struck by her statement that she had one of those comforting "stopovers" on her one-way road of life when her children  were young and "when Daan and I were happy" because I have long thought that the period when my Sarah and Andy were still little children was the happiest time of my life, though it was a time of consdierable unhappiness for Anne, who yearned to get out of the house and return to the workplace.  I can't think of any time that came closer though I suppose second place would clearly go to the period when I was so deeply enthralled in my First True Love, until she dumped me when I returned from a couple of months of active duty in the Navy.

 

 

 

5/5/2026

 Tuesday, May 5, 2026

1916 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic and stayed until 1924

1965 First large-scale US Army ground units arrived in South Vietnam

2022 WHO study of excess deaths worldwide said 15 million more people had died than normal, far above the official COVID-19 death toll of 6 million 

2025 The Vatican announced that it would convert and donate a Popemobile into a mobile health clinic for wounded children in Gaza, Palestine, in accordance with one of Pope Francis' final wishes.

In bed at 8:30, onto the LZB in the middle of the night, up at 4:22; 0435 128/75/85. 120 204.8; 43/35/55/42, mostly cloudy day ahead.

Morning meds at 6 a.m., with half dose of Bisoprolol at 5 a.m.  At 5:05 a.m., my AppleWatch jiggled and gave me a "low heart rate" warning, registering a heart rate of 34.  What does this mean in light of what Dr. Singh has told me about "false readings because of the ventricular tachycardi???

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I finished it this morning, wondering why I had devoted as much time as I did to it.  In the last chapter of the noevel, Joyce uses Stephen Dedalus to articulate Joyce's theory of Beauty, based on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas:  Pulchra sunt quae visa placent, or that is beautfiul the apprehension of which pleases.  That said, a reader has to wonder why Joyce wrote the way he did, the incoherent, circular, stream of consciousness, head-scratching, hard to follow way that he did.  He didn't do it when he wrote Dubliners, but he started with in Portrait, went full-bore in Ulysses, and became completely incomprehensible in Finnegan's Wake.  Did he really think he was making something beaufiful?  I guess he did.  Maybe he thought only a handful of people were able to truly appreciate "real" breauty, meaning he himself and a few literary dilettantes, perhaps the types that got into Deconstruction and a lot of the post-Modernism stuff impossible for most of us to grasp.  The Ezra Pound types.  In any case, this poor child from St. Leo parish on the south side of Chicago gets lost pretty easily in a verbal thicket of non-sequiturs of the type Joyce loves.  I'm the same way with most contemporary poetry that is incomprehensible.  The poets must think their work is beautfiul because it is to them, but for readers other than them, it's meaningless.  What's the point?   Consider this "poem" by Gertrude Stein.  It's a small excerpt from Tender Buttons, published in 1914, 2 years before the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

GLAZED GLITTER.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.

Does this have any meaning, to a reader or even to Stein? 

When is a "ceasefire" not a ceasefire?  The Americans and Iranians are shooting at each other in the Persian Gulf/Strait of Hormuz.   SecDef/SecWar Pete Hegseth and the President say that these acts don't exceed 'the threshold of hostilities' necessary to invalidate the ceasefire, or something like that.   He also says that the 'battle for Hormuz' is "separate and distinct" from the war with Iran.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

 “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. . . . Political language – annd with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. . . . “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. . . . In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. ― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

 

Callou callay!  A gorgeous Baltimore oriole on the suet feeder this afternoon.  Time to put out some oranges.  We've also had white-throated and white-capped sparrows feeding on the ground under the feeders, the the occasional bluebird as well.  I've seen some surprisingly aggressive behavior,by a mouning dove lately, even towards another dove.  It seems like I ought to be able to think up some line of poetry about that, but I draw a blank.  I'm reminded of Joan Clark's experience among some Quakers, whom she characterized as very passive-aggressive.😧

 

5/4/2026

 Monday, May 4, 2026

D+179/105

1535 Five Carthusian monks were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England

1977 US Catholic bishops rescinded automatic excommunications for divorced and remarried Catholics (receiving communion but still outlawed it if the previous marriages were not annulled by Church tribunals)

1990 Latvia's parliament voted 138-0 (1 abstention) for Independence

2001 The Milwaukee Art Museum addition, the first Santiago Calatrava-designed structure in the United States, opened to the public

2021 Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a historic apology to the Mayan people for abuses against them in the five centuries since the Spanish conquest 

2023 WHO declared COVID-19 over as a global health emergency, but it remainsed a significant threat, with seven million known deaths and a real total likely 20 million

In bed at 9, awake at 4, moved to LZB, up at 6; 0430 112/63/53 120 206.0; 65/42/72/46, sunny with elevated concern for wildfire conditions..  

Morning meds at 8 a.m.,  and half dose of Bisoprolol at  6:40 a.m.  

We watched the documenary on the100th anniversary of The New Yorker last night.  It included a comment by art, theater, and cultural critic Hilton Als: Throughout the city there is beauty, if you pay attention and are really looking, to which I thought, how true, and for every city, every hamlet, every rural area.  It reminded me of our back yard, of all the trees all over the place, of the spring flowers now in bloom and the summer and fall flowers to come, of the elegant, interesting homes throughout the area.  Als is correct that we have to pay attention and really look about us, and throughout much of our lives, we are too busy with the daily affairs of life to do that.  The same is true of our vision of other people; there is hidden beauty in them too, but we rarely get to see it.

I took a ride up to Random Lake this afternoon, via I-43, Hy.57, Jay Road, Ozaukee Couty 3, Hilltop Road (a favorite view of Wisconsin countryside), Camp Awana Road, Hy. 144 back to Hy. 57 to back home.  The weather was sunny and uncommonly warm, in the low 70s, but it'll be 20° cooler tomorrow and the rest of the week.  I listened to chapter 5 of Portrait while driving through the countryside.

Oh, how I am carried back to my youth by Portrait of the Artist!  From Chapter 4:

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and with an early mass. . . His daily life was laid out in devotional areas. By means of ejaculations and prayers he stored up ungrudgingly for the souls in purgatory centuries of days and quarantines and years; yet the spiritual triumph which he felt in achieving with ease so many fabulous ages of canonical penances did not wholly reward his zeal of prayer, since he could never know how much temporal punishment he had remitted by way of suffrage for the agonising souls . . . On each of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out of it day by day the seven deadly sins which had defiled it in the past; and he prayed for each gift on its appointed day, confident that it would descend upon him, though it seemed strange to him at times that wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so distinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart from the others. Yet he believed that at some future stage of his spiritual progress this difficulty would be removed when his sinful soul had been raised up from its weakness and enlightened by the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity. He believed this all the more, and with trepidation, because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness, the eternal mysterious secret Being to Whom, as God, the priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of the tongues of fire.

Those endless Catholic religion classes taught by the Sisters of Providence and the Irish Christian Brothers!  Those so-called Theology classes taught by the Jesuits, all based on St. Thomas Aquinas!  That off-putting terminology (Paraclete Parakeet), all that Latin (Tantum Ergo makes your hair grow!) All those lists (7 gifts of the Holy Ghosst, 7 deadly sins, sanctifying grace vs. actual grace, . .), the mysteries of Faith,   Nobody could beat this kind of stuff into your heads and consciousness like the Irish religious and they carried their dedication and tenacity to America, and to my parish on the south side of Chicago in the 1040s and 1950s.  And no one could write about it more tellingly than James Joyce.  I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry as I read and listened to the descriiptions above in Chapter 4.

I tend to be hard in my judgments about Catholic education, harder than I should be.  The 40s and 50s were not the 2020s.  I grew up at the end of the Pre-Vatican II Church, the Church of Pius XII, not the Church of John XXIII.  I was born at the end of the Great Depression, just before Pearl Harbor and World War II.  The Sisters of Providence who taught me dealt with classes of 40 to 50 studends, boys on one side of the room, girls on the other.  They had rather little formal education themselves and little preparation for teaching those huge classes other than what they themselves experienced in their own Catholic education.   It was a hard life and many didn't do very well.   I remember especially my teacher in 5th or 6th grade who couldn't deal with the stress(es) and had to be replaced early in the Fall semester.  There are many good memoirs in print about life in the convent, some of which I've read, like Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate: My Climb Out of  Darkness, and Removing the Habit of God: Sister Christine's Story by Susan Bassler Pickford.   They are powerful, touching stories of girls and young women struggling with their relationship with God.  When I joined St. Francis of Assisi parish in the 1990s and became active in parish and Church affairs, I found that the most admirable members of the parish (in addition to my friend Troy Major and Roland Wright) were a few religious sisters.  I regret losing my relationships with them when I left the parish after falling out with the provincial leadership of the Capuchins during the child sex abuse scandals.

On the othjer hand, in the 5th and concluding chapter, Joyce relates Stephen Dedalus's and his friends' arguments in college about Thomistic philosophy, Irish identity, the definition of Beauty, Art, and suchlike, much of it in Latin.  I have a hard time reading and/or listening to Joyce, and this chapter is particularly difficult for me.  Much of the dialogue is just words that float over my head.  I'll finish the book, probably tonight or tomorrow morning, but I'm not enjoying it except for the parts where he exposes the wretchedness of the Irish Catholic Church.

  

5/3/2026

 Sunday, May 3, 2026

1921 Northern Ireland was created under the UK Government of Ireland Act partitioning off six north-eastern counties with a Protestant majority

1926 US Marines landed in Nicaragua (9 months after leaving), stayed until 1933

1960 The Anne Frank House opened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2007 Peter Charles Clausen was born at West Allis Memorial Hospital to his mother Anh Hoang Clausen and his father, Andrew Charles Clausen

In bed at 9ish, up at 5:30; 0545 155/78/54 119 204.0; 46/32/63/43, windy, overcast. 

Morning meds at 10 a.m., and Bisoprolol at 6:45 a.m.    

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  My back started acting up so I went back to back this morning and listened to, rather than read, where I am in Portrait, Chapter 3.  I had forgotten what a superb job Joyce did in providing to the reading world an example of the Irish Catholic Church's teaching on Heaven and Hell, sin and its eternal consequences, and mostly, God's just punishment of his children who die not in a state of sanctifying grace, i.e., with at least one mortal sin on their soul.  Growing up in that Church was living and being formed in a Reign of Terror.  I relate to and react to Joyce's writing about it so intensely because I grew up in that Church.  The American Catholic Church that I grew up in was an Irish Catholic Church.  Most of the hierarchs were Irishmen, and perhaps they still are.  Our archbishop in Chicago was Samuel Stritch, as Irish as Paddy's pig, as we used to say.  Our parish pastor at St. Leo the Great parish was the Rt. Rev. Patrick J. Malloy, another Irishman.  My teachers at Leo High School were the Irish Christian Brothers, mostly Irishmen.  And, of course, my own blessed mother, Mary Healy Clausen, was the daughter of Dennis Healy and Catherine O'Shea Healy, both Irish immigrants.  Here's just some of what I wrote of growing up in the Irish Catholic Church in the chapter of my memoir I titled "Born in the Bosom of the Church":

There is a story about Jesus in the gospels of Mark and Luke that receives too little attention from the professional Church, the priests and nuns and eminences with satin beanies and palatial residences.  Mark tells it like this:

People were bringing little children [or toddlers] to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.  But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Surely whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

Luke has the disciples even more authoritarian and off-putting than Mark: “when the disciples saw them, they sternly ordered them not to do it . . .”

It’s a great tale of Jesus’ warmth and physical affection – “he took them up in his arms . . .”   The aspect of the story that I am focusing on here, however, is that it is the disciples of Jesus, the ‘true believers,’ the ‘in crowd’ that stood between the children and Jesus.  It was the people closest to him who built a wall around him, attempting to fence Jesus in and fence the innocents out.  I reveal my hostility toward clericalism in admitting that I can’t help thinking of those disciples as the ecclesial ancestors of the Church’s clerical caste, the professional God-guys, or at least the pharisaical ones, of whom I have known a good many.

With our home life on the Good Ship Clausen so precarious and sometimes stormy, my mother’s stabilizing keel notwithstanding, the major influence on Kitty and me other than our family was the Catholic Church.  This influence was exercised mainly through parochial schooling at St. Leo’s Grammar School for both of us and Leo High School for me and Visitation High School for Kitty.  The grammar school was run by the Sisters of Providence headquartered outside Notre Dame, Indiana.  Leo was run by the Irish Christian Brothers and “Vis” by the Sinsinawa Dominicans with their motherhouse south of Platteville, Wisconsin.  

. . .

    The most popular priest was a young fellow named Father Burke.  He was friendly and open without any hint of being manipulative or predatory.  I remember only two things about him.  One, that I liked him.  Two, that he was delegated to come into our 7th and 8th classes before summer vacation to give us the temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-avoidance-of-occasions-of-sin talks.  In large part because the American Catholic Church was so thoroughly an Irish Catholic entity, the avoidance of ‘the solitary vice,’ of ‘self-abuse,’ of anything having to do with s-e-x was about as important as defeating Godless Communism and keeping the “undesirables” out of our neighborhoods.  Father Burke told us boys (the girls of course were in another classroom waiting to get their temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-never-BE-an-occasion-of-sin-for-a-boy talk) that staying in a bathtub or shower any longer than was necessary to remove the dirt from our bodies was inviting damnation.  Better a soiled body than a sullied soul.  

    Growing up Irish American Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago was a schizophrenic    experience.  While we received occasional infusions of “God so loved the world . . .” the main teaching of the Church, which is to say the professional God-guys, was fear of eternal damnation.  The Church touted the Little Flower and St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds when it needed a little romanticism and sentimentalism, but its regular indoctrination came right from the same Calvinistic hellhole that Jonathan Edwards drew from when he wrote his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon.  The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. There was precious little difference between 16th and 17th century Puritan moral theology and the Irish Catholic moral theology of the mid-20th century.  Damn near every sin more grievous than disobeying your mother was a mortal sin and if you died with one mortal sin on your soul, the eternal fires of Hell awaited you.  Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?  Imagine holding a lighted match under your finger for one second.  For ten seconds.  For ten minutes!  Ten hours!! TEN THOUSAND MILLION GAZILLION YEARS!!!!!   And that’s not one one trillionth of one one trillionth of ETERNITY!    And, to make growing up more interesting, any boy or girl could get into this kind of trouble as soon as they reach “the age of reason” which the God-guys decided was 7 years old.  This teaching was enough to keep a pubescent boy awake at night praying for no wet dreams, especially before he fell asleep.

    At least if one did slip into a sin of the flesh meriting burning in Hell for all eternity, the sin could be forgiven by coming alongside Father Devereaux and being grappled.  One sin and only one sin was unforgivable: hating the Holy Ghost.  I believe I learned this in the 5th or 6th grade from one of the Sisters of Providence who had it on the highest authority:

"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."-- (Matt. 12:31-32)

As soon as I learned of this unforgivable sin and that I must never say “I hate the Holy Ghost”, I was constantly pursued by the Evil One tempting me to say “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  I was a 10 or 11 year old neurotic haunted by the soft siren call “Go on, say it.  Say you hate the Holy Ghost.  Go on, say it.”  I still remember the terrible day I was dispatched by my teacher, Sister Mary Chalkdust, to take the wastebasket downstairs and empty it.  All the way down the back steps at St. Leo Grammar School I struggled against my obsessive wrestling against thinking the words “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  No.  Don’t say it.  It’s unforgivable!  No use.  I thought the words in a complete sentence: “I hate the Holy Ghost.”  I was done for and I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet. 

. . . 

    I can now half-laugh at the absurdities that were beaten into my head and my heart as a child under the spiritual authority of Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Stritch, Monsignor Malloy, and the Sisters of Providence, but of course it wasn’t one bit humorous as I lived through it.  Along with the horrors of living each day in this world with my father’s abysmal unhappiness and alcoholism, I had the Church doing all in its power to convince me that there was no hope for me (or my family) even in the next world.  I cannot think of all that hellfire and damnation brainwashing that we went though other than as, at best, the sick visions of some deeply neurotic people and, at worst, as willful child abuse by  those who knew they were speaking untruths.   The deeply neurotics included many of the priests and nuns as is evidenced in Karen Armstrong’s wonderful biography about her life in a convent Through the Narrow Gate, Andrew Greeley’s Uncertain Trumpet, and by other writings about life within the clerical and religious castes.  The child abusers included many others, popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns and brothers, who were willing to toe the party line of the official Church for career reasons and/or for social control reasons knowing that what they said was pure bullshit.    

. . .

    Whose purpose was served by having children believe that the ground they walked on was a moral minefield and that at any moment they could stumble into eternal perdition?  When the disciples saw the people bringing little children to him, they sternly ordered them not to do it.  What was accomplished other than the creating of more neurotics whose lives were driven by fear rather than love?  Those who benefited from the Moral Reign of Terror, of course, were those in the clerical or priestly caste.  Those of us in mortal fear of eternal damnation had one practical way out, and that was to repair to the confessional to be shriven by a priest.  Absolution was the ticket to Heaven and the priestly caste had monopoly power over the tickets.  The popes and the bishops, for their part, owned the railroad.

The disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.  Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks!”  Matt. 18:1-7

Woe indeed.  Stumbling blocks indeed.  What anguish we suffered if we believed, and believe I did.  What threats we endured if we couldn’t believe, a sin against Faith.  Repression, suppression, oppression were the hallmarks of the Irish Catholic Church and the American Church was an Irish Church.  Wonderment about matters religious that might deviate from the Teachings of the Church?  Sinful.  Normal maturing through emerging sexuality in childhood and adolescence?  Sinful.   Failing to toe the line with all the laws of the Church, like “making your Easter duty?”  Sinful.

    As I look back on those days, what strikes me more than the spiritual and emotional pain the Church put us through is what the Church didn’t do.  It didn’t help us.  It didn’t help us grow up.  Not emotionally, not spiritually, not religiously.  It was in great measure negative and life-denying.  Having grown up in that cold Irish spiritual environment, William Blake’s church poems immediately appealed to me, poems like Garden of Love.

I went to the Garden of Love, 

And saw what I never had seen; 

A Chapel was built in the midst, 

Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this Chapel were shut 

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door; 

So I turned to the Garden of Love 

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves, 

And tombstones where flowers should be; 

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, 

And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

and The Little Vagabond

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, 

But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; 

Besides I can tell where I am used well, 

Such usage in Heaven will never do well. 

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale, 

And a pleasant fire our souls to regale, 

We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day, 

Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray. 

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, 

And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; 

And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at Church, 

Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch. 

And God, like a father rejoicing to see 

His children as pleasant and happy as he, 

Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel, 

But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel. 

In the Irish American Church of my youth, however, there was no “God like a father rejoicing to see His children as pleasant and happy as he.”  It was a Church of little joy, little delight, little peace, little awe, but no lack of dogmas, doctrines, rituals and rules, sins and sufferings.

If the Church was cruel to its children ‘born in the bosom of the Church,’ it was no less cruel to adults, especially mothers. . . 

. . . 

    I have scratched the surface of some of the besetting sins of the Church I knew as a child and a youth: clericalism, legalism, authoritarianism, sexism coupled with a morbid sexual obsessiveness,  racism,  secrecy and superstition.  It was an institution marked by pride and arrogance and an addiction to power and control.  St. Paul admonished the Colossian Christian community “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.”  These virtues were for the sheep, Pius X’s ‘docile flock,’ not for the shepherds.  The besetting sins of the Church existed long before the mid-20th century and well beyond the archdiocese of Chicago.  Some of them pre-dated but became fixed by the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 and they were still around at and after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.  

    It was my experiences with the official Church, the Church as power structure and Establishment that started me on the road to philosophical anarchism, a personal philosophical rejection of the notion of Authority.  Power and gospel values do not coexist comfortably.  That is the essential contradiction within the official Church, an inherent contradiction at the very heart of the Church.  My later experiences with the United States government during the Vietnam War and with all sorts of governmental and other power structures confirmed a deep-seated rejection of anyone’s or any entity’s claim to Authority, at least outside of a parent/small child relationship.  It was Pius X’s power play in asserting papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council that led Lord Acton, one of a handful of British peers who was Roman Catholic and an opponent of the Pope’s power grab, to pen the famous ‘Acton’s axiom’:

If there is any presumption, it is . . . against holders of power, increasing as the power increases . . . Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.  There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

To which I say “Amen.”

A page from my holographic watercolor sketchbook Live in the Time of Covid, living with the pandemic under Trump

I could have put sections of Joyce's Chapter 3 in today's journal, but the journal is a collection of reflection of thoughts I have thought and and of writings I have written about my life, not Joyce's.  One of the great things about keeping a journal is that there are no rules.  Personal journals are personal, just a form of diary.  I wish I started journaling long before I was in my 80s and coming apart.  I did journal on some of our trips to Europe and I've often picked them up and reread them to recall things I had long forgotten.  But I suppose it's only on vacations and in retirement that we have the time and motivation to be scribbling in notebooks and writing thoughts on laptops.

The Heart Surgery.  Geri and I had a long, serious, detailed, and good conversation this mornning about my upcoming heart surgery (and the recommended bladder surgery) and why the decision to have the surgery or to cancel it is not an easy one.