7/17/2026

 Friday, July 17, 2026

1917 Royal Proclamation by King George V changed the name of British Royal family from German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor

1959 Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered the partial skull of a new species of early human ancestor now called Paranthropus boisei, which lived in Africa almost 2 million years ago

1962 The Senate rejected Medicare for aged Americans

2025 The British government announced it would lower the voting age to 16, allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the upcoming general election

In bed at 9:15, on La-Z Boy from 9:35 till 10 (low glucose alarm), up at 5; 0515 203.0 136/83/63 108, 0525 114/77/62?!?

Morning meds at 9:10 a.m.  Trulicity injection at 9 a.m.

Trump's election security speech last night.  Old lies were repeated, with claims of non-existent proof, evidence, facts.  He is setting the stage for massive interference in and subversion of the November election and the 2026 election.  He had powerful members of his cabinet in the room as he delivered the lies, and they gave him a standing ovation at its conclusion.  His administration is a den of thieves, a cabal of criminals, a confederation of anti-democratic conspirators.  My country is in deeper shit than it has ever been in my lifetime.  Stand back and stand by.  

Tell Me Everything.  I finished this novel at midday today.  As is so often the case, I am not quite sure what I think about it.   A novel is just a long story, and Elizabeth Strout tells a good story, and this one was surely a good story.  I was already pretty familiar with Lucy Barton and with her first husband William from reading Strout's 4 previous novels about her, but I was not familiar with Bob Burgess or Olive Kitteredge, not having read her earlier novels about them.  I'm now inclined to go back and read those earlier novels to learn more about what made them the way they were.  We did watch the HBO Max 4 part series based on Olive Kitteredge, but it left me scratching my head about what made her tick.  There is no way a movie or TV series can get inside a character's heart and soul the way a good novel can, and Elizabeth Strout excels precisely at getting inside her characters' characters, what makes them tick.

Tell Me Everything is more about Bob Burgess than any other character.  He is a lawyer, indeed a criminal defense attorney, as is his brother Jim.  He is a good man, a mensch, and much of the tension in the story arises from his never-realized desire to have an affair with Lucy.  He has been married to his second wife, Margaret, a Unitarian minister, for 15 years, but he has a serious crush on Lucy.  Bob is a compassionate guy, as is his creator, Ms. Strout.  So are Lucy and Margaret. There are no pure villains in her stories; even the bad guys have reasons for their badness.   A telling scene in the novel is when Bob chews out his nephew, Larry, for treating his father, Jim Burgess, as an evil person.   He instructs the nephew that his father is not evil, but rather a broken person, and that we are all broken.  

“These are broken people. Big difference between being a broken person and being evil. In case you don’t know. And if you don’t think everyone is broken in some way, you’re wrong. I’m telling you this because you have been so fortunate in your life, you probably don’t even know such broken people exist.”This is a central point in Strout's novels.  That, and that we never really understand each other.

This is a central point in all of Strout's novels that I have read.  This, and the fact that we can never really understand and communicate with each other. 

“Lucy said, looking at him now, “My point is that every person on this earth is so complicated. Bob, we’re also complicated, and we match up for a moment—or maybe a lifetime—with somebody because we feel that we are connected to them. And we are. But we’re not in a certain way because nobody can go into the crevices of another’s mind, even the person can’t go into the crevices of their own mind, and we live— all of us— as though we can.”

She writes that we are all lonely people, yearning for real connection, communication, understanding one another and being understood, but never quite making it, even with those to whom we are closest.

Her stories also always subliminally raise the question of to what degree our actions are the result of free will.

 “We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.”

I enjoy her writing and her focus on questions of free will & determinism, how difficult or impossible it is to really know one another or even ourselves in some ways, and loneliness as a part of the human condition.  Although I'm glad I read the book, I thought it was not as well-written as the other 5 books of hers that I've read this year.  It seemed kind of forced or contrived, especially the conversations between Lucy and Olive and even the weekly walks taken by Lucy and Bob.

7/16/2026

 Thursday, July 16, 2026

1945 The first test detonation of an atomic bomb occurred at Trinity Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico,

1964 Republican convention selected Barry Goldwater as the presidential candidate

1973 During the Watergate hearings, Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of tapes

2018 Helsinki Summit; Trump credited Putin's word over the US intelligence community

In bed at 9, up at 5;  0515 202.6 116/70/65 105, 0525 123/74/64

Morning meds at 8:10 a.m., and last day of Eliquis blood thinner at 7 a.m. and 8 p.m.   

A bouquet graciously sent by Steven Aquavia to his Aunt Geri.

I write this note on July 15, the day before the date of this journal entry.  I do it because yesterday's journal, on the anniversary of my mother's death, I devoted the journal to her, and because today is the day Geri came into my bedroom and told me that Jimmy Aquavia died around 5 this morning.   I was on my La-Z-Boy reading Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything, and she had just gotten off the phone with her niece Katherine, who conveyed the expected news.  It seems we are all kind of numb about Jimmy's death, not because we didn't all have a love for him, because each of us did, but rather because in his last years, and especially his last months, his life was so diminished by dementia.  

The Oven Bird

By Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Jimmy was, like my other good friends who have died, a man of great vitality, great abilities, and great values.  Ed Felsenthal, Tom St. John, David Branch - all gone.  My best friend and sister, Kitty, gone.  Today is mostly a day of reverie, thinking of all of them, and of my parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins.  All gone, with me next.  Geri and I are now the sole survivors of our birth families, feeling doubly orphaned by the loss of parents and of all siblings.  It's a day of remembering and anticipating. 

Spring and Fall

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

. . . .  . . . . . .   ...................................................................................

Hazardous Air Quality Alert:  The Air Quality Index hit a record 644!

  A Health warning og Emergency Conditions is in effect.  EVERYONE is even more likely to experience serious health effects.

From today's Wall Street Journal:

The Mystery Money Powering Trump’s Second Term:  The president and his allies have built a network of groups financed by wealthy donors and businesses that is advancing his priorities with little public disclosure, by Marianne LeVine and  Maggie Severns

 Donald Trump has turned his second term into an unprecedented fundraising blitz, raising well over half a billion dollars from wealthy donors and stashing it in a sprawling network of nonprofits, cultural institutions and committees that he and his allies control. 

Companies seeking lucrative contracts or favorable policies from the administration have poured millions of dollars into these funds, which have become a key tool for Trump to pursue his political and personal priorities. . . .

In many cases, details about where the cash is coming from or how it is being spent are shrouded in secrecy, . . Some Trump-linked funds remake Washington, others repurpose institutions and others have supercharged fundraising for Trump’s political agenda.

 The Wall Street Journal documented more than $781,948,878 in donations and other payments to Trump-linked groups since the 2024 election. . . .  

As always, the best government money can buy.

7/15/2026

 Wednesday, July 15, 2026

1973  My mother died at age 51

Today. Jimmy Aquavia died around 5 a.m. at age 92

In bed at 9:10, up at 6:10, but on the LZB from 3 to 4:20, b/c of flank pain.

Morning meds at 9 a.m.,  and Eliquis at 6:50 a.m. and 7 p.m.

 My mother at Kitty's wedding, Oct. 8, 1966

My Mom.  On this date and on her April 15th birthdate, I honor her and subordinate all entries to remembrances of her, her heroic strength and resilience, her loving heart, and the care she bestowed on all around her, especially me and my sister.  I devoted a long section of my memoir to her.  Here are the opening and closing portions (addressed to my children):

My mother was a hero and a saint.  You may have heard me say that we are surrounded by saints and miracles, that the world is full of them.  I believe that, and I should add heroes to that short list.  It was my mother who first introduced me to real-world saintliness and heroism. . . . . 

My mother’s early life reads like a melodrama.  Born to poor immigrant parents, she was motherless by age 5, left the only female in her family.  She was 7 years old when the market crashed in 1929 and a child and adolescent throughout the Great Depression.  Her father may have been an alcoholic during her childhood (as he was in his later life), and there were times (I know this from her) when the Salvation Army left baskets of food at the Healy doorstep.  She left high school before graduation to get a job, either to support herself or to help with the family's expenses, or, more likely, both.  (It’s uncertain whether she lived with a couple of aunts for a time before she married.  My Aunt Monica says yes, my father thinks not.)   She became a bride at 18, a mother at 19, a victim of a brutal sexual assault at 25.  Her husband was drafted before she turned 22, leaving her with a 2½ year old son and a daughter on the way.  For support, she had $22 each month from my father’s $50 private’s pay and an $80 military dependents’ allotment from the government.  Her father was 64 years old and probably an out-of-control drinker by the time her husband was drafted and all three of her brothers were away in the services.  Her husband fought in the worst slaughterhouse battle in the Pacific theater, with Marine casualties so horrific that William Randolph Hearst wrote an editorial calling for a change of top command in the Pacific theater of operations, and TIME magazine wrote about the furor over the editorial.  When the war ended, and her husband came home, he was one of the thousands of hidden casualties with no missing limbs but with a hole inside him where his heart and soul had been and with a mind full of horrors that, like the Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima, crept out of hidden recesses to terrorize him.

My mother suffered greatly in her too-short life.  She suffered from the absence of a mother, she suffered with an alcoholic father and alcoholic brothers, and, after the war, she suffered with an alcoholic husband with a terrible case of long-term PTSD.  She suffered from James Hartmann’s vicious attack on her in her own home.  These were in addition to the “ordinary” sufferings that life brings to each of us.  

I would create an altogether inaccurate picture of your grandmother, however, if I were to paint her as some sort of long-suffering victim and martyr.  Of all of us in the family, it was she who was the strongest and the most life-loving, the least self-pitying and least blaming, the most aware of life as a blessing and a gift, the most religious and Catholic, and the most grateful for all that she had, especially her children.  She was the most loving and the most loyal, even to those who did not return the love or loyalty.  She was no whiner or sniveler.  She sang, and she danced.  She laughed.  She liked people, and people liked her. She was not naïve or Pollyannaish, but rather optimistic and hopeful.  She saw goodness and promise and dignity in people who were down and out after the Depression and the war, (including her husband, her father, and her oldest brother.)

Ironically, I believe your grandmother was the happiest person in our family.  It is clear to me as I look backwards that my paternal grandparents and Grandpa Dennis were unhappy people.   My poor Aunt Monica was terribly burdened and not a happy person.  Uncles Jim and Bud were heavy drinkers, as was Uncle Bim until Aunt Marie straightened him out.  Kitty and I were also unhappy because of what we lived with.  My mother hated my father’s drinking and withdrawal (and wasn’t averse to letting him know about it), but she was grateful for what she had.  She had ‘the attitude of gratitude,’ a sure mark of a basically happy person.  She was most grateful for her children, and she let us know how much she loved us and how much we meant to her.  She rejoiced in us.

Her not wallowing in self-pity, her not worrying about what she didn’t have, her seeing positives in what were to most observers totally bleak situations are as much proof as I need of her saintliness.  She had Faith, Hope, and Charity, not just as the so-called theological virtues, but as practical day-to-day living virtues.  Paul wrote to the Hebrews that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  My mother had a firm belief in the “things not seen.”  She, like T. S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday, knew that 

. . . . time is always time

And place is always and only a place.

And what is actual is actual only for one time.

And only for one place

She never lost sight of the fact that there is more to life than the troubles of the moment.  

She had Hope in abundance; witness her sticking with my father, witness her support for her children’s success in school and other endeavors, witness her own stick-to-it-iveness in moving up from “the Greeks” to The Old Barn, from the factory floor to the Quality Control Lab.

Her Charity or loving kindness towards others was abundant, towards my father during the terrible years, towards her father, towards her brother James, towards her in-laws, towards her children, and towards herself.  Unlike so many of the other adults around her, she never sank into self-destructive behavior (except for the then-commonplace habit of smoking cigarettes and a fondness for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that were to play a role in her death)

I close this terribly inadequate portrait of my mother by repeating my central point, that she was my first, best, and most lasting model of a saint and a hero in a world that I eventually came to see as full of saints and heroes and miracles.  Through strength of will and strength of character, she was a happy person despite all of the obstacles, all of the excuses for unhappiness.  If Kitty and I had not had her model for happiness in adversity, had we only had our father, our grandparents, my uncles, and my aunt as models, I don’t know that we would have known any happiness in our lives or that we could have transmitted any sense of happiness to our own children.   It took effort, it took strength, it took heroism for my mother not to feign happiness, but to be happy despite everything.  

She was also a circle-breaker.  Her father, her brothers, her husband, and her in-laws were all unhappy for one reason or another.  It is easy enough to say that they ‘had every right to be unhappy’ and to wallow in the ‘slough of despond.’  But no one had any greater ‘right to be unhappy’ than my mother.  If she had chosen to live a life of self-pity, however, she would have transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, her husband, and to all around her.  Attitudes are contagious.  Your grandmother’s attitude was one of courage, of continued engagement with life, of not giving in to despondency.  She transmitted that attitude to Kitty and to me, and although we have faltered along life’s road, it is her attitude that still sustains us.  It is her attitude that we have tried to transmit to you.  I hope you can, from this wholly inadequate word portrait, garner some idea of why your grandmother is, for your father and for your Aunt Kitty, our patron saint, our guardian angel, and our hero. 

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

Jim Aquavia, June 28, 1934 - July 15, 2026

7/14/2026

 Tuesday, July 14, 2026

1570 Pope Pius V introduced a standardized Roman Missal (text of the Latin Mass), a reform of the Council of Trent.  It will remain unchanged for 400 years.

1789 The French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris.

2025 Twenty-four U.S. states and the District of Columbia filed a joint lawsuit against the  Department of Education in an attempt to reverse the freezing of education funding ahead of the start of the school year. 

In bed at 9:40, up at 5:35; 0545 204.4 138/80/61 97, 0555 128/7762; 71.92/71, sunny

Morning meds at a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and 7:52  p.m.

Quagmire, noun, an area of soft, wet ground that you sink into if you try to walk on it; a situation that can easily trap you so that you become involved with problems from which it is difficult to escape.

The U.S. has been trapped in three quagmires during my life: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Will Iran become the fourth?  Will Iran be yet another in the line of America's "endless wars"?  I suspect it is too soon to tell; it's been going on for only somewhat less than 5 months, since February 28th, a blink of an eye compared to Vietnam and Afghanistan, and even Iraq.  Nonetheless, it sure has the feel of another quagmire, another endless war that constantly consumes American military and economic resources, American treasure, and American lives.  Early on, I called it Trump's tar baby, and so it has become, at least so far.

The morning news: 

The new attacks over control of the waterway, which is a crucial transit route for oil and gas shipments, could intensify a conflict that has already roiled the global economy and left many dead. Oil prices soared on Tuesday in one of the biggest daily jumps since the start of the war, as Mr. Trump’s preliminary cease-fire deal with Iran lay in tatters.

Which surprised no one.

President Trump has said that the United States will charge a 20 percent fee on cargo shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, despite his own administration’s position that such fees violate international law.

Demonstrating once again Donald Trump's complete contempt for the requirements of law. 

Trump Backs Off 20% Strait of Hormuz Fee:  The decision comes just a day after the president floated the idea of charging other countries shipping cargo through waterway that Iran has sought to control

President Trump’s Iran strategy abruptly reversed course Tuesday when he announced the end of a plan to charge a 20% fee for commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

“Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday. 

Demonstrating once again his consummate skill as an extortionist. 

President Trump et al. v. Internal Revenue Service et al.  Judge Williams' ruling is great and is now an official record for historians.  It has gotten a fair amount of attention from the media, but I'm surprised that it is being treated only as a Rule 11 case, a case involving a frivolous, sham, totally non-meritorious lawsuit, and not as a judicial finding of a criminal conspiracy by the president, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.  The judge found that Trump's civil lawsuit was a sham designed to bilk the United States government out of billions of dollars.  Must that not be some species of fraud and of misconduct in public office? 

Tell Me Everything.  I started this Elizabeth Strout novel yesterday and have made very slow progress making my way into it.  I'm only on page 25 of my library copy of the book, having a hard time staying awake as I read it and avoiding tired eyes.  I may break down and buy a Kindle edition with Audible.  Already, in the very first paragraph, I was reminded of why I enjoy Strout's writing:

This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset an who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him.  Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself, like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document.  But he does; we all do.

Strout likes her characters because she likes people.  I suspect the same is true of Ann Patchett, and perhaps Anne Lamott.  She knows we are all flawed, that we all have weaknesses, that we are all subject to "the human condition."  She knows that we all suffer from ignorance and confusion about ourselves and about the people in our lives.   She is deeply compassionate and forgiving.  She knows we are all profoundly affected by our histories, our backgrounds, all the factors that Robert Sapolsky argues make "free will" imaginary.  I don't know that Strout goes as far as Sapolsky, but she goes pretty far along that continuum between "free will" and determinism.  As she writes in opening this novel, we all have some things worthy in our lives to document, though for most of us, virtually nothing is documented,  On page 21 of the book, Lucy Barton on learning of Olive Kitteredge's parents' lives, remarks, "Jesus Christ.  All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them."  It's clearly her purpose to record at least some of them, which, even though fictional, cast light on the lives all her readers live.   Early in chapter 2, she writes about the family backgrounds of Lucy Barton, Bob Burgess and their spouses, including:

Margaret Estaver [Bob's wife] had been raised a Catholic before becoming the Unitarian minister that she now was, and William [Lucy's former husband] had been raised a Lutheran, as his father had come over from Germany after the war.  We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they many not be completely so.  We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.

Or, as Emily Dickinson wrote,

In this short Life that only lasts an hour

How much - how little - is within our power

And William Blake,

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.  

 On page 5, Strout writes that Lucy had always liked Bob Burgess - "She thought he had a quiet sadness to him, most likely from this early misfortune."  It made me think of my family and how, on my father's side, most had "a quiet sadness" to them that lasted their entire lives.  Grandpa Dewey, Grandma Charlotte, Aunt Monica, my Dad himself, and then Kitty and me.  It wasn't that everyone was a Micky the Mope all the time, but, as  I wrote years ago in my memoir, 

Ironically, I believe  [my mother] was the happiest person in our family.  It is clear to me as I look backwards that my paternal grandparents and Grandpa Dennis were unhappy people.   My poor Aunt Monica was terribly burdened and not a happy person.  Uncles Jim and Bud were heavy drinkers, as was Bim until Aunt Marie straightened him out.  Kitty and I were also unhappy because of what we lived with.  . . . . .  If Kitty and I had not had [my mother's] model for happiness in adversity, had we only had our father, our grandparents, my uncles and my aunt as models, I don’t know that we would have known any real happiness in our lives or that we could have transmitted any sense of happiness to our own children.   It took effort, it took strength, it took heroism for my mother, not to feign happiness, but to be happy in spite of everything.  

She was also a circle-breaker.  Her father, her brothers, her husband, her in-laws, all were unhappy people for one reason or another.  It is easy enough to say that they ‘had every right to be unhappy’ and to wallow in the ‘slough of despond.’  But no one had any greater ‘right to be unhappy’ than my mother.  If she had chosen to live a life of self-pity, however, she would transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, and to her husband, and to all around her.  Attitudes are contagious.

 

The conservative Republican talk radio host Dennis Prager wrote a terrific book I read many years ago, titled "Happiness is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual".  One of his major points was that attitudes are contagious, that people who are in the presence of happy people feel happier themselves, and the opposite is true of those surrounded by unhappy people.  He argued that striving to be happy is a moral obligaation.   "We owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be" because our happiness conditions affects those around us, especially family members.   Persistent unhappiness can make life significantly harder for those around us, so striving for happiness is a way of serving others, not just ourselves.   One of his recurring themes is that grateful people are happier, while chronic ingratitude fosters unhappiness. He argues that cultivating gratitude is one of the principal ways to fulfill this "duty" to be happy.  

All of these thoughts are triggered in me by reading Elizabeth Strout's novels.  

Anniversary thoughts:  First, how well I remember that official missal and how pleased I was to have my own St. Joseph's Missal, with its red ribbon page marker, its "Proper" and "Commons", the parts that varied with the liturgical calendar and the parts that were common to all masses, the original Latin and the English translation.  It was all so exotic, so historical, so well designed to be mysterious and to set us Catholics apart from other religionists who spoke and prayed in their vernaculars.  Vatican II hit as I and millions of other Catholics were moving from youth to adulthood and its changes reduced much of the exoticism and mystery of the liturgy by requiring that the mass be celebrated in the vernacular, having the priest facing the congregation, having the congregation respond to the priests' call in the vernacular rather than altar boys responding in Latin, etc.  Of course, it was inevitable that there would be resistance to all those changes and there was.  It's still going on.  In a long article in the Sunday NYTimes on July 10, 2024, entitled America’s New Catholic Priests - Young, Confident and Conservative"  In an era of deep divisions in the church, newly ordained priests overwhelmingly lean right in their theology, practices and politics, it seems clear that the traditionalists opposing the spirit and the letter of the Vatican II changes are winning the battle within the Church.  Perhaps this is not surprising in our world which seems to be generally moving away from reform and liberalism toward tradition, authority, and conservatism.  Alas.  I wonder what happened to my old missal.  It probably stayed at my parents' home as I grew up and moved away and eventually got trashed.  So it goes.

Second, it doesn't seem right to mark July 14th without acknowledging Bastille Day and the French Revolution which as much as a revolution and rejection of monarchy and aristocracy was also a rejection of the Church, theism, clergy, and hierarchy.  The Church has been fighting the French Revolution from Bastille Day till today.  So it goes.

Milwaukee's official high temperature today - 99℉!!!