6/4/2026

 Thursday, June 4, 2026

1919 US Marines invaded Costa Rica

1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre: unofficial figures placing the death toll near 1,000

1990 Dr Jack Kevorkian assisted an Oregon woman to commit suicide, beginning a national debate over the right to die

1991 Pope John Paul II compared abortion with Nazi murders

2024 President Joe Biden introduced immediate restrictions on the southern border, limiting illegal migrant crossings to 2,500 a day  (Too little, too late)

2025 The United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, with the remaining fourteen other members voting in favor.

2025  Donald Trump signed a proclamation banning entry into the United States for nationals of 12 countries deemed "very high-risk" due to terrorist activity, hostile governments, and high visa overstay rates, while imposing additional restrictions on visitors from several others. Exemptions applied for select categories, including athletes and diplomats. 

In bed at 9:15, awake and up at 5:25; 0545 131/88/50 118 203.0;53/78/51, sunny afternoon, otherwise cloudy.      

Morning meds at 8:15 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6:15 a.m.

Yesterday, I started reading Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton.  I was drawn to it because I enjoyed The Things We Never Say, and because I needed something new to read today and I found out that it is about a strained relationship between a mother and daughter based on the daughter’s childhood of abuse, deprivation, and poverty.  It rang a bell with me of course because of my troubled relationship with my father.  The stories have the same central theme: the impossibility of one human being really knowing another human being, even one with whom one shares a close or intimate relationship, including parent-child and husband-wife.  She has a corollary, which is that, although we know one another only imperfectly, that doesn’t mean we can’t love one another, though imperfectly.  It’s also about our lack of communication about the most important things in life.  Artie Dam asked why we never talk about things that are real, about what is going on inside us.  Lucy Barton wonders why her mother, who very clearly loves her, never tells her she loves her.  I’m moved by this latter point because it reminds me so much of my father, and not only with respect to me, but even more with respect to my little sister.   The story is also about PTSD, which Lucy’s father suffered from after WWII in Europe and my father suffered from after WWII in the Pacific.  The story is also about what Strout calls appropriately “moments of grace,” fleeting times in life when acts of kindness or connection occur between human beings.  One of the important characters in the novel is another writer (Lucy Barton is herself a writer) named Sarah Payne, who, in a workship that Lucy attended, remarked that everyone has but one story, that they tell over and over in different ways.  Elizabeth Strout clearly believes this herself and practices it in her own novels, at least based on the two I’ve read.

By the time I hit the sack last night, I had read about 85% of the novel. I started reading it again as I rested before my required morning "vitals."  Lucy Barton is a sad story - no, make that a very sad story.  For me, it has been a gut puncher though I'm not finished with it.  As I read it before taking the 'vitals,' Lucy's mother died, and a year later, her father died.  Her daughters went off to college and her marriage to her husband William ended.  Her renditions of these events are brief, concise - no, make that very brief and concise. - but almost every chapter of the novel is brief and concise, and there are 55 of them fitted into 190 pages.  She flew back to Chicago for her mother's last days in a hospital, where her mother asked her to leave.  She flew back to her childhood home (the house, not the garage) for her father's death.  Each death hit her hard but she was able to tell each parent that she loved them before they died.

When I got back to New York after seeing my father - and my mother the year before - after seeing them for the last time, the world began to look different to me.  My husband seemed a stranger, my children in their adolescence seemed indifferent to much of my world.  I was really lost.  I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us -off-kilter as we had been - was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended.  I kept thinking of my brother and my sister and the bewilderment in their faces when my father died.  I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts.  My husband said, "But you didn't even like them."  And I felt especially frightened after that.

I finished the book before Geri got up.  It affected me powerfully, because it reminded me so much of my own childhood and much of my adulthood, at least in terms of my relationship with my Dad.  He returned from the big war a wreck, profoundly unhappy and ill-fitted either to earn a living and support a family economically, or to love the small family that awaited him, or even himself.  He loved his birth family but not his marital family.  His psychological, emotional, and spiritual condition after his 21 months in the Marines and his 27 days on Iwo Jima had  devastating effects on my little sister and me, not just in our childhoods but throughout our lives.  Lucy Barton's father came back from his service in Germany during the war wrecked, ruined, haunted, much like my father returned from the Pacific.  As became clear to me in starting to read her next novel, Anything Is Possible, his wife Lydia may have been at least equally screwed up.  My sister and I, on the other hand, were singularly blessed in having a strong, loving, and supportive mother even though she endured her own Iwo Jima on September 30, 1947, when James Hartman stole into our little apartment as she, my 4 year old sister, and I lay sleeping.  [Blogger format screw-up again.]

6/3/2026

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

1946 International Military Tribunal opened in Tokyo against 28 Japanese war criminals

1989 Beginning of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy supporters in Beijing

2018 A dead whale was found with 17 pounds  of plastic in its stomach in Thailand

2025 Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sayid that he would defend Supreme Court chief Alexandre de Moraes from potential U.S. sanctions, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened over the ongoing trial of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

In bed at 8:45, CBG texted me at 9, and I replied, up around 3 again with a low glucose alarm, up at 5:15; 0530 130/66/31 126 203.0; 50/72/46, cloudy/partly cloudy day ahead.

Morning Meds at 9:35 a.m.,  and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6:30 a.m.

Text exchange with CBG

8:57 p.m. 

Caren Goldberg:

I found her writing process so interesting — inhabiting her characters and not knowing ahead of time what will happen. I loved that she had planned for Artie to tell Evie that her knew and she just couldn’t do it. And I loved that she felt it gave him power not to tell her. I thought it was an exercise of free will for Artie and gave him a certain freedom and the new shared secret with Rob and his son made them closer. While that secret made them each lonely, in the end it made her lonelier. And that the father of the girl killed in the accident came to Artie’s funeral gave such grace to him and a recognition on the father’s part of what Artie as a father had to live with. Strout’s writing about ordinary people and the human condition, our battles, our shared loneliness, inability to communicate and really understand one another is heartbreaking and beautiful to me at the same time. I feel inspired to take the time to look at people and talk to one or two.

Charles Clausen:

Amen.   She must have a very powerful imagination to so thoroughly become an imaginary creature, and not just one, but all the principal characters.  I found myself wanting to know more about Evie and the circumstances of her relationship with Flossie’s husband, much like I wanted to know more about the circumstances of the relationship between Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale.  How much just lust and the thrill of naughtiness and how much something less culpable.   I have to get to bed now.  I’m past my bedtime.😴❤️

8:45 a.m.

Good morning.  I was in bed, though not asleep, when you texted last night, so my response wasn’t very responsive.  I’m an old early bird, with a target bedtime of 9 p.m. and rising time of 5 a.m. though I often miss my target times.  

I’ll try not to trespass overmuch on your patience about this book, but here are some other thoughts it, and the Katie Couric interview, triggered in me.

1. I’ve gone back and re-read the first chapter, and notice how much foreshadowing she does in it, especially about the relationship between Evie and Reginald, and about Rob’s knowing about his paternity.  It seems that Strout must have at least a general idea of the plot of her story as she starts writing, about its fulcrum, or else why would she start as she did, with the regular get-togethers between Flossie and Artie, Flossie’s description of Reginald as an asshole, Evie’s knowing as much as she does about Flossie and Reginald’s marriage, and her disdain for Flossie.  On the other hand, perhaps she starts writing as Artie has his students write at the beginning of each semester, i.e., about anything at all, just so he gets some sense of who they are.

2. I was struck by the “Peyton Place” (showing my age) aspect of the community about which she writes.  Flossie’s husband slept with Artie’s wife, Flossie slept with Anne Merrill’s husband, principal Hoover Lakeland was involved in an affair with someone for years, Danny Marino’s mother was having an affair, and even Rob had a relationship with a younger woman Rachel while still married to his older wife Francesca.

3. I was confused about how old Artie was when he died.  He was 57 when the story starts, which was during the 2024 presidential election, and died “several years later”, yet we’re only in 2026.  Maybe Strout was blessed, as Artie was, with some “precognition.”

4. Strout leaves Artie’s nagging doubt about free will vs. determinism unresolved but I noticed that, when Katie Couric asked her her own views on the question, she said she didn’t know, but that she believed we have a lot less free will than we suppose (or something like that.)  I’m inclined to agree with that.  I’ve watched a number of lectures by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford primatologist/biogeneticist, about the issue and ought to read his book on the issue, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.”  His basic theory, supported of course with a lot of data/evidence, is that every human action is the product of causes that precede it. He believes we are fooling ourselves when we think that we act and make choices freely.  It’s a lot to think about, with a lot of social and political consequences.  And it makes one wonder about all the “choices” made by the characters in the novel and of course the choices we’ve made in our own lives.  Just how free are or were those choices? I think particularly of Artie’s strange shoplifting and of Rachel’s strange kleptomania.

5. I think it’s interesting to engage in some counterfactual wondering about the Dam family.  What would have been the results if Reginald had never told Rob of his paternity?  If Rob had never told Artie?  What if Rob had, as he had originally intended, told his mother but not Artie?  What if Artie had told Evie instead of keeping it his and Rob’s secret?  Strout told Katie Courie that she originally intended that Artie would tell Evie, but that she/he ‘just couldn’t do it.’  It makes one wonder, why?  What causes caused her inability to have Artie tell Evie?  Was her choice free or pre-determined?  Was Artie’s?  Just asking the questions suggest the issue of free will vs. determinism insofar as we expect the answers would affect , which is to say, determine, subsequent behaviors on the part of those affected by them.

As I suppose is clear, I tend to run off at the mouth (and on the keyboard) in my old age, and there is no need to respond to any of this.  If you do, however, you know I’m always interested in your thoughts.  Thanks again for alerting me to this novel and to this author.

 Caren Goldberg

I love hearing all of your thoughts — you give me a lot to think about. I found it interesting that Strout didn’t really have much to say about free will in the interview and I wondered if she just chose not to share. I think Strout gave a lot of herself in the interview and I felt she was entitled to hold back and maybe that was part of what was going on. It will be interesting to see if it’s made into a movie. 

 

 

 

6/2/2026

 Tuesday, June 2, 2026

1941 Edward George Felsenthal III was born in Chicago, IL

1963 I graduated from Marquette University and was commissioned in the USMC

1989 10,000 Chinese soldiers were blocked by 100,000 citizens in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, protecting students demonstrating for democracy

1997 Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168

2022 Queen Elizabeth II marked her Platinum Jubilee with four days of celebrations, starting with a military parade at Buckingham Palace 

2025 United States Midwest aluminum premiums rose by 164% after demand for aluminum in the physical market increased due to Donald Trump's plan to increase tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from 25% to 50%. 

2025  Donald Trump announced that the recent U.S. proposal for a deal on Iran's nuclear program does not allow any uranium enrichment by Iran, despite previous media reports to the contrary.

In bed around 9:15, awakened at 1:15 by low glucose alarm, and again at 3:20, half-slept until 5:05; 0525 131/68/32 120 201.8; 53/67/50, sunny.

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6:10 a.m..

I ended yesterday and started today reading The Things We Never Say, which has become a painful read, stirring and recrudescing too many memories, too many thoughts, too many questions.  By the time I went to bed yesterday, I had read 80% of the novel, a quick but painful read.

Today would have been Ed Felsenthal's 85th birthday, had he not died on June 23, 2024.  Bill Wiseman, my former student and research assistant, and husband of another former student and research assistnt Christine Giamo, died around the same date.  It's also the 63rd anniversary of my graduation from Marquette's liberal arts college and my commissioning in the Marine Corps, and the scattering of the Notch House gang: Bill Hendricks, Paula Bochicchio, Jerry Nugent, Camilla Wakeman, Anne Smith and I, and Ed Felsenthal.  Tom Devitt started the scattering by graduating early, in December 1962 and promptly marrying Veronica Colby, just as in the following June, Ed married Lynn the week following our graduation and I married Anne one week later.  For a short time, Tom and Ronnie were our next door neighbors as he finished up and I started Basic School at Quantico.  Anne and I did not have a telephone there.  We shared Tom and Ronnie's phone.  It was on their phone that I received the call from my mother informing me of the circumstances of her rape by James Hartmann.  Tom went on to become an artillery officer and I went on to become an air defense control officer.  He, Ed, Jerry, and I all went on to serve in Vietnam, but at different times and places so our paths never crossed there.  The photo is of Anne and me on graduation day with our first car, the Chinese red Buick pimpmobile, that got us from Milwaukee to Quantico, Quantico to Brunswick, and Brunswick to Yuma, the first legs of our long odyssey.

Text to CBG:

I finished The Things We Never Say, appropriately enough, in the waiting room of the outpatent mental health clinic at the VA medical center this morning.  (If you’re interested, I will explain how I got there some other time.  It’s neither very interesting nor dramatic.)  I enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s writing and am a little surprised that she’s a law school graduate and married to a lawyer.  I’m not sure how I feel about the story.  Since it’s set in present-day America, it cuts pretty close to the bone.  She doesn’t paint a pretty picture of where we are in Trump Era America, nor does she give us much hope that things will get markedly better post-Trump.  In that respect, she mirrors my own thoughts, my own pessimism.  Down at the interpersonal level, she doesn’t paint a pretty picture of our own ability to communicate with and understand one another, and again she mirrors my own judgments.  “So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves” and “mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own.  Thinking all the while that we can see.”    On the other hand, she believes in our ability to love others, despite the inability to really know and understand  “the vast, unknowable universe” inside every other human, including those who are closest to us.

I liked Artie Dam and really felt his loneliness.  He stuck me as a likeable, even lovable, guy, and a kind one.  As I said yesterday, I tend to identify so closely with him because of parallels in his life as imagined by Strout and my real life that reading of his woes and struggles was painful.  I was struck by how bleakly Strout painted his world.  He long contemplated suicide, his first principal (another kind, likeable guy) did commit suicide, and his next -door neighbor’s first wife tried to commit suicide.  I was struck too by how sad Artie’s final days were.  The scene with him going semi-catatonic in his classroom reminded me of the ending of “The Sisters,” the first story in Joyce’s THE DUBLINERS, in which the priest was found laughing all by himself inside a confessional.  In any case, what made the story not completely grim and tragic seemed to me to be the fact that real love existed between the characters, Artie and his son, Artie and Evie, Artie and Ken, the Trump supporter who saved Artie from drowning, and between Artie and his students, especially Danny and Rhonda.   I’m interested in your thoughts.

6/1/2026

 Monday, June 1, 2026

1916 US Senate confirmed Louis Brandeis for the Supreme Court of the United States by a vote of 47 to 22, over 4 months after his nomination

1962  Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel for SS war crimes

1967 The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album was released

2020 President Trump threatened to employ the military to quell protests across the country over the death of George Floyd, then walked with staff to St. John’s Church

2025 At least 31 Palestinians were killed and 170 others were injured while thousands of people went to receive aid from an American-funded humanitarian aid distribution centre in Gaza City. Israel denied its responsibility and released drone footage showing armed, masked men firing at civilians attempting to collect humanitarian aid.

In bed by 9, awakened by the alarm at 5; 0515 143/79/33 124 202.0; 53/67/52 cloudy, partly cloudy.

Morning meds at 10:50 a.m.,  and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:50.

I've started The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.  CBG mentioned yesterday that she had read and enjoyed it and I've been looking for my next read since finishing The Scarlet Letter.  What a difference in writing styles between Hawthorne's 1850 demanding prolixity and Strout's crisp, clear narration.  I'm only about 30 pages into the novel but I'm already captivated by it, probably because I see so many parallels between my own life and that of the protaganist, Artie Dam, a 57 year old high school history teacher, who is not without friends and his long-time wife, Evie, but is lonely, who has twice seriously contemplated suicide in his life and the means to do it while making the death appear accidental, and who seriously ponders whether and to what extent we really have "free will."  (Quite an example of a run-on sentence!😝)  He also grew up in a basement apartment, with with sister and his parents, one of whom was mentally troubled.  He also rues that his relationship with his son is much more distant than he would like.  "Every time Artie saw him, his heart broke a little more."  He also 'married up,' and felt some shame about his working class parents compared to his wife's parents.  Artie is a complex character, like the rest of us and this early in the book, he is still a mystery to me, but one I want to know more about.  This particular set of parallels seems kind of unlikely to me.  I have a hunch I may finish this book by tomorrow.

I met with my primary care provider, NP Kali Kisro, this morning at 8 a.m.  Nothing to report, except that I was touched when she told me at the end of our appointment that she's not a praying person, but that she does have some sort of belief in good wishes having some mysterious efficacy, and that she will be sending good wishes my way on the 15th.  

Some anniversary thoughts.  Louis Brandeis lives on in my thoughts for this: 

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.    Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)

Can we ever forget: Donald J. Trump, Defender of the Faith.

 

The mass shooting of Palestinians trying to obtain food from an American humanitarian group.  Was it the Israelis or Hamas who did it?  Hamas or the IDF?  The IDF or Shin Bet?  Or Mossad?  Or a Palestinian gang?  Or the Islamic State in Gaza?  Was the drone footage real or fake?  Real of AI?  What is anyone to do with "knowledge" or "news" like this anymore?

5/31/2026

 Sunday, May 31, 2026

1900 US troops arrived in Beijing to help put down Boxer Rebellion

1912 US Marines landed on Cuba

1921 A large-scale race riot broke out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, later described as the worst incident of racial violence in American history with 150-300 African Americans killed 

1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in a Montreal hotel, during their second 'bed-in' for peace;

2025 A court in Guatemala convicts three men of crimes against humanity and sentences them to 40 years in prison for the rape of 36 women from the Maya Achi indigenous group during the civil war. 

In bed at 9, up at 4:30; 0445 145/83/64 123 202.0, 0505 143/81/65 93;  49/64/48, cloudy day ahead.  

Morning meds at 7:40 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:30  a.m.

Summer Spring Winter FALL.  As best I can recall, that was the name of the Indian princess on the Howdy Doody puppet show when I was a kid and home television was still a new thing.  I think of her today because, while doing my required restful sitting with both feet flat on the floor before taking my blood pressure, I read one of Donald Hall's essays (he's a former Poet Laureate of the U.S.)  in his collection, Essays After Eighty, the one titled "Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr."  The title refers not to the large number of doctors one regularly sees after age 80, but rather to the number of honorary doctorates Hall has received, leading a friend to adress him not simply as Dr. Hall, but as Dr., Dr., Dr., . .  The chapter is actually a rather harrowing account of his life after 80, describing a number of automobile accident he caused, and at least one house fire.  What caught my attention mostly though was his description of his various falls, because they reminded me of my daily battles with the law of gravity.

I don't recall my earliest notable fall, but I have photographic evidence of it.  I was about 3 years old and I climbed through a break in a fence/railing around the depressed entryway to our apartment building's basement, where our little family lived, sometime before my dad was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to Iwo Jima to kill and/or be killed.  I fell only a few feet to the concrete below, but landed right on my noggin and fractured my skull.  Somewhere in the basement I have a photo of myself with the top of my head wrapped in tape or bandages, taken my my mom or dad with my mom's writing on the back, "Don't loft [laugh] at me, Daddy!"   

The only unintended fall I recall during my years in the Marines occurred during a middle of the night training exercise around our air control center in Yuma, AZ, when I was still a second lieutenant.  I was in charge of a small group of supposed guerrilla infiltrators tasked with blowing up the installation which was located on top of a small, rocky knoll at the Yuma air station.  While creeping up the hill at the head of my sappers, I turned to quietly warn them that the footing was treacherous, and, as I started to do so, I slipped and received quite a gash on my right shinbone.  I looked and felt silly, of course, and the staff sergeant who was my second-in-command had to take me back to his quarters after the exercise was completed to patch me up.  I still have a 2 inch scar from that fall but what I remember most is the embarrassment I felt as I took a tumble while warning my troops not to take a tumble.

The only memorable fall I recall in my early civilian life was falling out of a tree in front of the Kenwood Avenue Methodist Church, while helping my next-door neighbor Lance Herrick, who was the pastor of the church.  I don't remember why I was up on that tree, but I do recall falling out of it and the zinger I experienced when I hit Mother Earth.  So far as I know, I suffered no serious damage from the fall, but who knows?  Maybe that fall coupled with the fractured skull when I was a youngster set the stage for my becoming as Geri once described me, "eccentric."😀

We have lived in our current home in Bayside for 14 years now and in that time, I have fallen several  times.  The first time was many years ago when I heaved a heavy branch down the steep-ish slope to the ephemeral pond on our lot's western boundary line.  I heaved the branch so forcefully that I followed it down the slope and had to climb on all fours up the slope to get back onto my feet.  Another embarrassment.😟  Then a couple of years later, I fell down wrestling with a large package of some sort at our front door.  A little embarrassing, but again I could get back on my feet by myself.  

Since I turned 80, my falls have been more problematical than embarrassing, because I'm no longer able to get back on my feet by myself.  My leg muscles are too weak and my balance and general coordination too poor.  I fell once in my bedroom doing-I-can't-remember-what and had to call to Geri to help me up.  A couple of years ago, I fell (backwards this time) in the tv room, trying to pick up some pencils I had dropped, hit my head on the built-in bookcase/cabinet, and had some bleeding from my elbow.  That time, Geri had to call 911 and get the North Shore Fire Department to the house to get me up and check me out.  The paramedics offered to take me to the VA ER but I declined.  Finally, just a couple of months ago, in March, I took a header, or more accurately, a knee-er, on our driveway, while taking the trash cart down to the curb for pick-up the next morning.  I was proud of myself for making sure before I went out that I had my iPhone with me AND a flashlight, just in case.  And sure enough, where the driveway's downslope becomes steeper, the trash cart started rolling faster than I was moving, taking me down to the 20℉ asphalt.  I tried to call Geri on my iPhone but it seemed that something wasn't working, perhaps my iPhone, perhaps my fingers, perhaps my brain.  BUT, mirabile dictu, my Apple Watch (the cheap one) worked, noticed my fall, as well as my longitude and latitude, and called the North Shore Fire Department who responded in due course.  While waiting for the paramedics, I shined my flashlight on and about the trash cart, hoping to attract some driver passing by and, sure enough, a young couple in a pickup truck, stopped to help.  The lady went to the house and alerted Geri of my plight while the gent stayed with me.  I told him the fire department was on the way and indeed, they showed up within minutes, got me on my feet, assisted me into the house, checked my "vitals," asked if I wanted to go the ER, and left when all appeared to be OK.

When I was hospitalized for 5 days in March for very low heart rate and blood pressure, I was confined to bed, not by railings or bars, but by a pressure-activated alarm system that blasted whenever I got out of the bed.  I had to call a nurse every time I wanted to go to the bathroom or to get out of the bed for any reason.  I begged the attending nurses to turn off that alarm system so I could go to the bathroom by myself, like a big boy.  They explained, quite properly, that I was, quite literally, confined to bed because of my very high risk of falling which, in turn, had a high risk of a broken shoulder, broken hip, etc., or worse, of hitting my head and getting "a brain bleed, which can leave you a different person."  I was finally told that whether to release me from bed confinement would be up to a professional assessment by a physical therapist.  When the physical therapist finally arrived, I told him that I was lobbying him for release from confinement and that I was well aware of my risks of falling, etc.  After taking me on a test lap around the entire hospital floor plan, he set me free.   I could have kissed him.  I felt the same kind of elation that I felt when Dr. Ryzka in Rheumatology officially confirmed my self-diagnosis of polymyalgia rheumatica and put me on prednisone.  The latter freed me from months of severe pain and disability; the former freed me to go to the bathroom by myself.  Such is life in the mid-80s.

In Hall's book, the essay following "Dr., Dr., Dr.," etc., is "Death."  In it, he writes: 

In my eighties, the days have narrowed as they must.  I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.  Louise the postwoman brings letters to my porch, opens the door, and tosses the mail on a chair.  I get around - bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, new chair by the window, electrical reclining (or lifting) chair for Chris Matthews and baseball - by spasming from one place to another pushing a four-wheeled roller.  I try not to break my neck.  I write letters.  I take naps.  I write essays. . . . My goal in life is making it to the bathroom.

To which I add only, amen. 

Dan and Caren Goldberg came over this afternoon.   Geri had offered some of our backyard ferns to Dan for transplanting and she and he did their gardening business while Caren and I talked about her mother's cervical fracture and her encounter  and conversation with another resident at the retirement facility, named Bob.  Bob had worked at the Milwaukee County Zoo, primarily walking the camels and elephants, and also related a story about falling in a manure pit and having a load dumped on him.  We also schmoozed about her recent read The Things We Never Say and mine of The Scarlet Letter.  We sat on the patio in the sunny, 61℉ weather, with everyone comfortable except me, who was freezing, even with work jacket on.  I think it's not just old age, but also the heart problems.

Geri attended Ellis's performance of Coppelia this afternoon at the Cudahy high school theater.  She enjoyed it, not so much the story, but the music and Ellis's dancing, but she had ants in her pants after a while since it lasted almost 2 hours.

5/30/2026

 Saturday, May 30, 2026

1431 Hundred Years' War: 19-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal in Rouen, France

1912 US Marines were sent to Nicaragua

1965 Viet Cong offensive against the US base Da Nang began

2023 400 leading AI industry experts signed a letter warning, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority” 

2024 A jury in New York City found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records

2025 Donald Trump announced that the tariff on steel and aluminum imports would be doubled to 50%, potentially raising prices for housing, autos, and other goods.

In bed at 9, up at 4; 0420 124/75/53 133 203.0; 53/62/51, cloudy, Beach Hazards warning, waves 2 to 4 feet, dangerous currents.

Morning meds at 9:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:30 a.m.

I finished The Scarlet Letter this morning, before Geri woke up.  I wanted badly to finish it because reading it had been such a struggle.  I looked for some reviews of it to see if I was alone in having a hard time with it, and the first set of review I found was in Goodreads, with a heading "The Scarlet Letter Question."  A reader wrote:

I just finished this book and I have to admit I struggled with it a lot.  I found it boring and not nearly as deep as I was expecting it to be.  I could hardly read three pages in a row without getting distracted and putting it down for hours.

Oh, yes.  Other readers used terms such as "far from accessible," "monotonous and long-winded," and  "fantastically badly written, turgid prose throughout."   Others disagreed, not surprisingly, but I found reading the novel to be, to use Donald Rumsfeld's term, 'a long, hard slog."  I read it and listened to it, most often at the same time.  I usually like listening to Audible renditions because it reminds me of lying on the floor when I was a kid, listening to stories on the radio, especially the huge, old console radio at my Aunt Monica's house.  

I thought I had read this book as a youth, maybe in high school, and that I had enjoyed it.  If I did, which I'm not finding hard to credit, I must have been quite a nerdy high school student.  Perhaps it was The House of the Seven Gables that I read and enjoyed.  Or perhaps I'm just hallucinating,  I thought that the story was mainly about hypocrisy, but there wasn't all that much about hypocrisy in it.  Rather, the main focus was on the personal experience of guilt and shame, both by Hester Prynne and by Arthur Dimmesdale.  In Hester's case, the experience was social as well as personal, i.e., the magistrates and townspeople branded, humiliated, and shunned her - not so much for having sex, which she did in secret, but for becoming pregnant and having a baby with no husband in the picture.  In Dimmesdale's case, the guilt and shame were private and internal, springing from his consciousness of the tremendous disparity between Hester's public shaming and shunning, and his freedom from social punishment for the same sin as Hester's, and from his consciousness of wrongdoing in the general moral sense and because of his special position as a clergyman,  Dimmesdale reminded me somewhat of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,  Their sins/crimes are very different, of course, but each was haunted by the sense of guilt. and each could be redeemed only by acknowledging his guilt.  Chillingworth reminds a reader of Iago, insidiously befriending Dimmesdale only in order to betray and sicken him, and indeed to drive him mad.  On the other hand, Iago's Othello was, but for his tragic weakness of jealousy and distrust, a strong man whereas Chillingworth's Dimmesdale was a weak and indeed pathetic man, even in the most pejorative sense of the word.  The strongest and most admirable character in the story is Hester.  She is the only mensch, although her daughter Pearl may have turned out OK as a rich adult.  She wasn't exactly an ideal child. 

Last year on this date, I was thinking about music, and especially about

Brandi Carlile.  I'm a big fan.  One of the reasons is this song, "Everytime I Hear That Song," which she wrote with her longtime collaborators, Phil and Tim Hanseroth.  Phil is also Brandi's brother-in-law, having married her younger sister, Tiffany.  They all reside in homes on Brandi's land in the State of Washington, home state of all of them.  Brandi is a lesbian and has been married since 2012 to Catherine Shepherd, with whom she has two daughters.

A love song was playing on the radio / It made me kind of sad because it made me think of you

And I wonder how you're doing, but I wish I didn't care / Because I gave you all I had and got the worst of you

[Chorus]

By the way, I forgive you / After all, maybe I should thank you

For giving me what I've found / Cause without you around

I've been doing just fine / Except for any time I hear that song (Ooh)

And didn't it break your heart / When you watched my smile fading?

Did it ever cross your mind / That one day the tables would be turned?

They told me the best revenge / Would be a life well-lived

And the strongest one that holds / Would be the hardest one to earn

[Chorus]

When I woke up in the morning / I was choking on some words

There were things unsaid between us / There were things you never told

That's twice you broke my heart now / The first was way back when

And to know you're still unhappy / Only makes it break again. 

Carlile and other songwriters are poets, and the ones who sing their own songs (and others') are troubadours. It was great that Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.  Power to the people!  I admire and appreciate so many great songwriters and lyricists, and probably many not-so-great ones.  I love old pop classics, with Sophisticated Lady at the top of my list (lyrics by Mitchell Parish, born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky), followed by hundreds of others.  I love country and western classics, written by poets named Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson.  Unlike so much of what is passed off as modern poetry, the poetic lyrics of these songwriters are meant to be understood by everybody, Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babuska.  It's poetry about love and loss, God and Man, betrayal, addiction, heartache, homelessness and restlessness, loneliness, family and friends - the most basic elements of life.  The poems are meant to be sung, not read, and heard, hopefully by men and women who will be moved by them as Brandi Carlile sings "any time I hear that song."  We have a perfect marriage of lyrics and music, the emotional pull or punch of the song is irresistible, as it is with Sophisticated Lady and, thankfully, so many other great songs/poems.  As I write these words, I think of the tribute Brandi Carlile gave on the death of her friend John Prine, singing his sad, simple, and beautiful song, Hello, In There.  I think too of another sad, simple, and beautiful song that I always associate with war and the loss of friends, My Buddy.  I am powerfully moved by powerful poetry, like Yeats's Vacillation, and Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father, Kenyon's Otherwise, and Maggie Smith's Good Bones, and no less moved by powerful songs, poems in their own right.  I am surprised by how easily I am emotionally moved by music in my old age, much more than when I was younger.  Any orchestral concert or ballet performance involving the concerted efforts of a great many people will do it, but so doew watching the 2021 "Official Music Video" of Janis Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee, not only because of her great recording of Kris Kristofferason's great song but also becasue of its reminder of her death, for which I can't come up with a fitting adjective.

I wonder if everyone, or at least most of us, have a former romantic partner whom we identify with a song.  I wonder too if I like Brandi's 'Everytime I Hear That Song' because it reminds of my two past love interests and songs I don't like to hear because they remind me of 'what might have been.'  The earlier was my First True Love Charlene, with whom I identify Tommy Edwards' It's All In The Game and even more, The Folks Who Live On The Hill.  The second was my first spouse Anne with whom I identify My Funny Valentine.  Each of them lives on in my memory and I think of them, in very different ways,  whenever I hear "our songs."   For decades, I truly carried a torch for Charlene because, I suppose, of the shocking way in which our relationship ended, one of the great mysteries in my life and something from which I never experienced "closure."  All of which is to say that I've never known why our two year love affair ended, why she dumped me while I was away on acive duty in the Navy.  I still remember the deep hurt however and am reminded of it whenever I hear Tommy Edwards crooning the songs we danced and 'made out' to.  With Anne the ending of our marriage was a long time coming and no surprise to me, though it was to her, so when I hear My Funny Valentine, it hurts only because it reminds me of our failures, especially my own failures, to face up to challenges in our marriage long before we separated, starting during my time in the Marine Corps.  It was more than 65 years ago that Charlene dumped me, a lifetime, and more than 40 years since Anne and I separated, yet I still have  reactions to songs that were part of our lives.  Music hath charms, but also barbs, as Brandi Carlile's song so clearly reminds us.

5/29/2026

 Friday, May 29, 2026

1916 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic, staying until 1924

1954 Pope Pius XII issued a holy declaration canonizing former Pope Pius X as a saint 

2025 Israel announced 22 new settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, the biggest expansion in decades.

2025  Donald Trump commuted the federal prison sentence of Larry Hoover, the founder of the Chicago street gang Gangster Disciples, who was sentenced to six life sentences on conspiracy, extortion, drug and other criminal charges in the 1990s.

In bed by 9:30, awake and up around 4:45; 0515 136/78/54 87 203.4; 48/71/45, sunny day ahead.

Morning meds at 8:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6 a.m.

The Orange by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

                                                                                                        Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the                                                                                                                     park.

                                                                                                        This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

                                                                                                        The rest of the day was quite easy.

                                                                                                        I did all the jobs on my list

                                                                                                        And enjoyed them and had some time                                                                                                                         over.

                                                                                                        I love you. I’m glad I exist.

I had intended to skip writing today, a day off, and to enter only some poetry and favored images, but while skimming an article in this morning's Wall Street Journal about Vladimir Putin's quest for longevity, I noticed this:

Average male life expectancy in Russia today is about 68 years, according to official statistics, compared with roughly 76 in the U.S. and over 80 across much of Western Europe.

For Africa, it is 62 years.  These numbers make me more conscious of the fact that I'm playing with house money at 84.   When I was born in 1941, I believe my life expectancy was about 63.  No wonder I'm falling apart.