Wednesday, May 27, 2026
2012 A NATO airstrike in Afghanistan killed a family of eight, including six childr
2025 The National Assembly of Vietnam begins deliberations on a government proposal to end the death penalty for some offences, including drug trafficking and some national security crimes, replacing them with life in prison without parole.
In bed at 9:15, awake around 3:30, up at 3:55; 0410 133/77/57 65 204.8; 57/69/54, mostly sunny day ahead, BEACH HAZARD WARNING, high waves 3 to 6 feet high, dangerous currents.
Morning meds at 8:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 4:35 a.m.
I woke up this morning reliving my conversation with Nurse Lisa yesterday afternoon, thinking of another in-patient hospital stay, even if only an overnight, of Zeke Emanuel and of Jack Levine.
During my pre-BP flat-footed rest, I started the chapter titled "The Leech" in The Scarlet Letter, wondering why Hawthorne characterized Roget Chillingworth, the 'wronged husband,' the 'cuckhold', the way he did, and wondering too why he treated Hester Prynne's sin as harshly as he did. Chillingworth is the monster of the story, physically and morally deformed, seemingly having only one purpose in life, that of outing the identify of Hester's lover and the father of Pearl, and of subjecting him to a punishment similar to Hester's. I'm wondering why Hawthorne creates the little love-child Pearl the way he does, as the literal embodiment of Hester's sin, physically beautiful, but wilful, with none of the self-discipine, or I suppose I should say, social discipline of the Puritan children in the town, and dressed in flamboyant clothing sewn by his disgraced mother, again separating her from the blacks and grays worn by the other children. I'm wondering too how Hawthorne views Hester's disastrous sin, how he views her relationship with Reverend Dimmesdale, how he thinks of sexual relations between men and women generally. Was sex to him something dirty or something sacred? Were Hester and Dimmesdale just irresponsible, irrreligious pleasure pursuers when they created Pearl, or did they share a much. more meaningful relationship?
The story is set in 17th century Massachusetts, in a Puritan community, but it reminds me of 20th century Ireland, and even of 1940s and 1950s Chicago's Catholic communities and their sexual mores. It reminds me of the notorious mothers and babies home in Ireland. From Wikipedia:
Mother and Baby Homes were founded in Ireland in the 1920s, to house unmarried mothers and their children, so excluding them from the rest of society. At least 12 homes were run by Roman Catholic nuns, three of which incorporated Magdalene Laundries, which operated as workhouses, forcing the women in them to do exhausting and unpaid work. The mothers and their small children are now known to have been physically and mentally abused by the nuns.
Deaths and misconduct in homes in the Republic of Ireland
The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters was established in 2015 by the Irish government to investigate deaths and misconduct from the 1920s to the end of the 1980s in mother and baby homes in the Republic of Ireland. The homes were mostly run by nuns. During this period, 57,000 babies were born to girls and women who resided within the 18 institutions investigated. The mortality rate for the babies born—15 per cent—was never raised as a cause for concern by the government or the Catholic Church. In particular, 973 children died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home (in Tuam, County Galway), according to the commission. It reported that a number of the children had been discovered inside an old sewage tank. Only 50 records of burials at Tuam are extant. The Irish government formally apologised in January 2021.
Mostly though, it reminds me of the Irish Catholic, i.e., American Catholic Church's obsession with sins of the flesh. From my memoir:
Father Devereaux was a younger middle aged priest who had a friendly manner, too friendly as I reflect on it. He was the confessor of choice for pubescent boys concerned about going to Hell for eternity because of what was happening with their penises and the impure thoughts that plagued their minds and troubled their souls (because they liked them.) Father Devereaux would hear your confession about anywhere and anytime by taking you into a corner or a vestibule or some semi-private place, throwing his arm around your shoulder, head or neck like a grappling hook, pulling you tightly into his chest, listening to you acknowledge your impure thoughts and deeds and then shriving you in return for three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and your resolve not to sin again (fat chance.) These physically close encounters of a weird kind with Father Devereaux were unhealthy to say the least. As I look back on confessions with him, I wonder what he was doing with his other hand while holding the penitent fast with the grappling hook. It’s hard for me not to believe that he was homosexual with a taste for pubescent boys. He was also though the easiest path to God’s forgiveness of our besetting mortal sins of impurity. If my suspicions about him are correct, I suspect there were some boys in St. Leo Parish who were victims of his sexual abuse. Of course, I hope my suspicions are wrong.
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.
So, even though The Scarlet Letter is set 'in a galaxy far far away,' Puritan Massachusetts hundreds of years ago, it's pretty easy for a Catholic raised in the 1940 and 1950s, before the Second Vatican Council, to relate to what happends in it.
As part of my campaign to take care of 'little shit' that I've been putting off too long, I deposited the checks from Costco and the state income tax refund at the bank this afternoon, along with stashing the endless supplied of medications, lotions, creams, and ointments I have collected from the VA. Also refilled my two weekly pill boses, did some laundry, tried to figure out how to access our streaming services on my new TV, sat on the patio for awhile admiring all the extraordinary ordinary beauty around me. . . . . . I stuffed two ancient Apple laptops into a carrying casse to return to the Apple Store for recycling. That's the easy part. The hard part will be getting them to the Apple store. They weigh a ton (for me) so I have to plan on getting to the store early on a weekday morning when I can find a parking space near the store. . . . I moved my 'death dossier' back out to the dining room table to go through it with Geri and see what else should be obtained and/or included. We've put it off too long, especially since the last few days I've felt like I've been at aux portes de la mort.
