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.

 

 

  

 

 

 

5/2/2026

 Saturday, May 2, 2026

1929 Billie Holiday (14) and her mother were arrested for prostitution following a raid on a brothel in Harlem, New York City

1938 Thornton Wilder won the  Pulitzer Prize  "Our Town

1949 Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman"

1978  Sharon Celek Kevil was born

2025 A Gaza-bound activist humanitarian aid ship catches fire and issues an SOS after what its organizers alleged was an Israeli drone attack off the coast of Malta in international waters.

2025 Donald Trump signs an executive order calling for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop directly funding NPR and PBS, and for government agencies to stop indirectly funding them.

In bed at 7with bad back pain again, right side, up at 6.  0625 145/78/51 117 205.4; 35/51/32, mostly sunny.   

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m., and half dose of Bisoprolol at 6:43 a.m.

My day started with a text from Sarah:  "The boys would like to say 'good morning!'

And I would like to say that after six or so years of on-again-off-again trying, I think I may have finally figured out how to bake a loaf of (good) sourdough bread.

I replied: "Ooooh, I love both photos!  I do miss Lilly and Blanche and all the furry companions I‘ve had throughout my life.  And as it happens, I have become a big fan of sourdough bread, especially toasted.  I’m glad for you, and a bit envious. And FYI, I’m scheduled for some heart surgery on June 15th, a catheter ablation to try to correct an arrythmia problem I have developed.  It requires an overnight hospital stay and I hope it doesn’t coincide with your visit.❤️

Anne Clausen:

Good morning, Max and Freddy! What big boys you are now. Very handsome as well. 

Now for something REALLY handsome: that bread. To die for! (I wish Maria were here to see it. She always lived your baking adventures!)

Chuck, I wish you well with your catheter ablation. I hope it is successful and that there are no problems. I also hope your overnight stay is warm and comfy. Take care. 

“Liked” not “lived” in the sentence about Maria. 

Charles Clausen:

Thanks, Anne.  I very much appreciate your good wishes.  It’ll be my third hospital stay this year, plus two day surgeries and a few ER visits.  As they say, not for wimps.  I hope you are doing well.

Unintended consequences.  This morning's New York Times includes a feature story on Japanese bathhouses, or sento, Not Even Japanese Bathhouses Are Immune From Shocks of Iran War, by River Akira Davis and Kiuko Notoya.  It relates that public bathhouses, an already diminishing institution in Japan in our era of private bathtubs and showers in private homes, are in danger of going out of business because of the high cost of oil due to Netanyahu's and Trump's war on Iran.  Reading the article and seeing its photos brings back memories of my too-short stays in Japan  and then on Okinawa in 1965 and 1966.  Most of my time in Japan was spent in the town of Iwakuni, about 25 miles south of Hiroshima, where there is a Marine Corps Air Station, a former Japanese Imperial Air Force base.  The orders overseas that I received at MCAS Yuma, AZ, designated the Marine Air Control Squadron at Iwakuni as my destination, but by the time I arrived there, the unit had already been deployed to the huge air base outside Danang, South Vietnam.  There was a tiny rear echelon still at Iwakuni under the charge of my buddy from Yuma, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall, and Ron appointed me the investigating officer for an accidental death of an enlisted man in our unit.  His head had been crushed as he tried to repair his car.  That investigation, and the scarcity of air transport equipment, kept me in Iwakuni and away from Vietnam for about 3 weeks.  I returned a few months later to deal with the dress uniforms and other stuff I had shipped from the States for my 13 month tour of duty, unaccompanied by family.  That visit was supposed to be for only 2 or 3 days, but ended up taking a week because of "space unavailable" for the return trip to RVN.  Still later, probably in 1966, I was sent on temporary duty for a week to the huge American naval bases at Yokosuka,  35 miles south of Yokohama.  Yokosuka was and is the largest US naval installation in the world, and I was sent there to attend "Crypto school," i.e, to learn all I could about crytography in a week.  It was part of my duties as the Top Secret Control Officer for Marine Wing Headquarters Squadron 1 in Danang.  I wish I could say I learned much about Japanese life and culture during my 4 or 5 weeks in Japan, but alas, I didn't.  I Yokosuka I spent all of my time working inside the moutain innards where the Crypto School was located, or resting in the BOQ, and in Iwakuni, when we weren't working or sleeping, we were usually in the Officers' Club on base or in the officers' bar in town, and the shadow of Vietnam hung over everything and everywhere.  I did, however, get to more than one bathhouse and more than one massage parlor, usually as part of recovering from hangovers from the night before.  So I learned that the Japanese are pretty fastidious about cleanliness and that they think the American practice of getting into a tub to clean up is ass-backwards.  They clean up by washing and showering before they get into a tub.  The tub is for soaking and socializing.  I was reminded of this, and so much more, by the article in this morning's Times.  I was reminded, too, to telling my Dad, once, that I enjoyed my time in Japan and the little time I got to spend with Japanese people, and his reaction.  After Iwo Jima, and all his experiences in the Marine during World War II, he had no use for Japan or its people.  Wars do that to people, though in the case of Vietnam, there was often an unavoidable ambivalence because, after all, we were there to help the Vietnamese, right?  Kind of like George III was helping the colonists, some of whom were rebelling against him because  "when push comes to shove, I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love."  But I deviate from the point: Japan's bathhouses are in danger of finally disappearing because of Bibi Netanyahu's and Donald Trump's war against Iran.  Such a small world we live in where such unintended consequences occur.  Or will they disappear because only the very old still use them, people my age and will they ultimately disappear with those very people, who still enjoyed soaking in a tub of 104° water while schmoozing with the neighbors rather than peering into a smartphone or a computer screeen?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I've started rereading this early book of James Joyce.  I'm not sure why, but I think it's to re-exerience his description of growing up Irish Catholic, as I did.  I'm just about through with the first chapter and I'm getting my fill of it, at least in the parts where he describes school masters inflicting corporal punishment on school boys , sometimes for misbehavior but also for failing to accurately conjugate Latin verbs or to decline Latin nouns, pronouns, adjectives, or adverbs.  Oh, those good old days of Brother Hennessey telling us to "face the birdies" as he whacked us on the ass with his drumstick, or Brother O'Keefe smacking us across our hands with  his thick ruler-thing, or Brother Charles Borromeo Irwin hitting the back of our heads  for any reason whatsoever.  Or poor young Brother Comack who almost broke his hand punching the blackboard in anger because he some poor bastard wasn't able to answer his question in class.  And no surprise when I read many years later that Charles Borromeo Irwin was credibly accused of sexually exploiting some some guy.  Our teachers were denominated the ICBs or Irish Christian Brothers, but we knew them as the International Child Beaters and James Joyce reminds me of those days.

    Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies.  Broke my glasses!  An old schoolboy trick!  Our with your hand this moment!

    Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards.  He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike.  A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eye.

 

5/1/2026

Friday, May 1, 2026

1943 Food rationing began in the United States during World War II

1961 Fidel Castro announced there would be no more elections in Cuba

2003 In what became known as the "Mission Accomplished" speech, U.S. President George W. Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" on board the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California

2011 Pope John Paul II was beatified by his successor, Pope Benedict XVI

2020 Armed protesters against stay-at-home-orders gathered at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, as Governor Gretchen Whitmer reinstated the State of Emergency

2025 District Court Judge ruled that US Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, deeming the previous use of this power as having been improperly invoked. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:30; 125/61/E, 3 mnutes later 139/74/30 129 204.8; 3643/36, cloudy all day. 

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

I woke up with a bad back.  I hoped that a hot shower might alleviate the pain, but no luck, so I put a 5% Lidocaine patch on it.  It kept me from attending the memorial service for our next-door neighbor, John McGregor, at Fox Point Lutheran Church with Geri, but thankfully, it was lifestreamed from the church.  This was the same church in which I attended the funeral for Brad Carr in 1996.  Brad died of cancer at age 50.  I had first met him when Anne and I lived in Juneau Village, during my first two years of law school.  I met him at a party in the apartment of Ron Warren, a law school classmate of mine for one years.  Ron was a physical therapist at Mount Sinai Hospital and worked full time during law school, which probably contributed mightily to his flunking out after our first year.  In any event, Brad Carr was a guest at the party and we met.  I can't remember our next meeting, or when we became friends of a sort, but we did.  I think Brad was teaching and an assistant basketball coach at a Milwaukee high school when I first met him, but he was a born politician and he soon became an aide to Milwaukee's long-term mayor Henry Maier, and the part-time, weekend sportscaster for WISN-TV, Channel 12.  Eventually he became a part-time law student, and eventually a lawyer doing a lot of municipal business which, alas, got him in some bribery trouble which cost him his law license in 1991.  Less than 5 years later, he died at age 50.  I suppose it's hyperbolic, but I think of him as a bit like Icarus, one with tremendous potential but who flew too close to the sun.  He was young, Black, handsome, intelligent, articulate, good-looking, a great tv screen presence, politically well-connected, a lawyer, but too hungry.  My good neighbor John McGregor wasn't the opposite of Brad, but very different.  He was born into the Stratton family, of Briggs and Stratton.  The family changed its name to McGregor from Schlesinger during one of the world wars, because of widespread anti-German animus.  He grew up wealthy, attending Milwaukee Country Day School, and Stanford University, but only after he recovered from polio that left him with some deformity and pain for the rest of his life.  He devoted his life to his family, and to his work in real estate development, and local charities, including Children's Hospital and the Schlitz Audubon Center.  He was a kind, gentle, and generous guy and a truly great neighbor.  He inspired (and shamed) me with his disciplined daily walks and recumbent bike rides.  We were born within weeks of each other in 1941 and, although we were never close personal or social friends (alas), my life was diminished by his death from leukemia.

I watched the entire memorial service on livestream from Fox Point Lutheran Church on Santa Monica Boulevard.  I enjoyed the eulogies given by a friend and by his son, Skip, and everything they said about John rang true.  I didn't get much out of the religious parts of the service, except for the duo who sang Panis Angelicus, which has been one of my favorite hymns for decades, probably since I was a kid.  The singers, ka baritone and a soprano, were both superb.

Panis angelicus
Fit panis hominum
Dat panis coelicus
Figuris terminum
O res mirabilis
Manducat dominum
Pauper, pauper
Servus et humilis

May the Bread of Angels
Become bread for mankind;
The Bread of Heaven puts
All foreshadowings to an end;
Oh, thing miraculous!
The body of the Lord will nourish
the poor, the poor,
the servile, and the humble.

 

4/30/2026

 Thursday, April 30, 2026

1975 Saigon fell & became Ho Chi Minh City

1977 Human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began protesting at the forced disappearances of thousands, under the Argentine dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla

2015 Bernie Sanders announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for President

2021 45 were killed and 150 injured in a crush of people at the Israeli Lag B'Omer festival at Mount Meron

2025 The United States and Ukraine signed the Ukraine–United States Mineral Resources Agreement to share profits from the future sales of Ukraine's mineral and energy reserves

In bed by 10, up at 6:15; 0625 138/73/47 110 205.4; 38/45/35, sunny

Morning meds at 9 a.m.; Bisoprolol half-dose at 7 a.m.

Apocalypse Now Redux.  There are many times when I wish I were smarter, more on the ball, less obtuse, a person with greater insight and understanding of what's going on.  Those times include when I don't get jokes on SNL, or on late night monologues, or when I read a poem that is comepletely indecipherable to me, or see a movie that I don't understand.  I sort of have that feeling about Apocalypse Now.  I think I get the big picture, i.e., that it's an indictment of American popular culture, and of our national hubris about our role in the world and what great things can be wrought with our immense military and economic weight.  It's no secret of course that the movie is a clever adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the jungles of the then-Belgian Congo to the jungles of Indochina, and from European economic exploitation to American military exploitation, from the hypocrisy of Western European civilization to the hypocrisy of American 'exceptionalism,' etc.  I especially enjoyed Col. Kurtz pointing out the hypocrisy of our military and poltitical leaders forbidding our airmen from writing "Fuck" on the fuselage of our aircreaft that drop napalm and white phosphorous bombs on human beings: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"  When I was in Vietnam, seven days a week for 33 weeks or so, I and my team kept track of thousands, I suppose tens of thousands, of our aircraft leaving and (mostly) returning from missions during which  they dropped fire, and high explosives, and poisons on tens of thousands of human beings,  human beings we were taught in our churches and many schools were "children of God," and "our brothers and sisters," and "our fellow men," and we did it with as much emotion and moral compunction or qualm as if we were keeping track of a factory's inventory of nuts, bolts, or sheet metal.  We flew into Vietnam with our rifles, heavy artillery, bullets, bombs, and herbicides and as if we had a perfect right to do so.  In the 'land of the free and home of the brave,' our government plucked young men off our streets, out of their workplaces, and out of their schools to train them to become killers of strange men and women and children thousands of miles away, men who posed a threat to our young men only because our government put them 'in harm's way.'  Anyone who knows me at all knows how I feel about our government and what it did in and to Vietnam, what it did to the young men it sent to Vietnam, and to their families.  Thus, it's obvious that in the main I am glad that John Milius wrote Apocalypse Now and that Francis Coppola turned it into the movie that showed at least some of what the war was like.  That said, however, I wonder whether they went overboard in their depiction.  I write 'I wonder' because I don't have a strong judgment about it.  To be sure, they depicted a hell on earth, and for those victimized by it, war can surely be a hell on earth.  And the most vivid image of Hell is fire, but the semi-ubiquity of fire in the movie seemed really gratuitious.  And what are we to make of the ritual slaughter of Col. Kurtz, much like the simultaneous ritual slaughter of a water buffalo by the montangards?  And what of the idea that the government has professional assassins in the special services?  Capt. Willard already had six assassinations notched on his .45 when he received the mission to assassinate Col. Kurtz.  And what of the assignmen to one man, armed only with a .45 pistol, to travel into Cambodia to kill Kurtz, who was surrounded by an army of loyal montangards?  I know these comments are incoherent, that they don't make much sense, and one doesn't follow from another, but it seemed to me on second viewing that the film doesn't quite hang together, that it sort of falls apart once Willard arrives at Kurtz's camp. It's probably me being not smart enough or educated enough to get it as a work of genius, but I don't understand the title, Apocalypse Now.  Wikipedia says "apocalypse" has come to mean a catastrophe "but the Greek word apokálypsis, from which it is derived, means a revelation."  I don't get what, in the plot of the movie, was the catastrophe, or what was the revelation.  Was it Kurtz's insight about the wisdom of the NVA/VC fores who chopped off the arms of the children who had been vaccinated against polio by his American special forces?    That 'wisdom' seems to be that moral restraint is a liability in war, that the end justifies the means, and that in order to win, one must embrace or at least accept horror as a means and to use it without hesitation.  Is this the point of the movie?  Or is it a rejection of that?  How about the means the Americans used?  Assassination.  Ritual slaughter.  How about Willard's murdering the girl with the puppy in the sampan?

This was an act of murder by the hero of this film, as was his butchering by machete of Colonel Kurtz.  What are we to think of these acts?  What are we to think of the other 6 assassinatins that Captain Willard commtted before Kurtz?  What are we to think of the general, the colonel, and the CIA agent who ordered it?  Who were the heroes in this film?  Were there any?  Maybe "Chief"?  

 

4/29/2026

 Wednesday, April 29, 2026

1970 US and South Vietnamese forces launched an incursion into Cambodia

1975 US began to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to the Vietnam War

1992 Jury acquitted Los Angeles Police Department officers on charges of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King; the decision sparked massive riots in the city

2022 World's longest glass-bottomed bridge, the Bach Long (White Dragon), 632m long, opened in Moc Chau Island mountain park and resort, Vietnam

In bed at7, not due to sleepiness, but attempting to lessen the right-side back pain that had plagued me all day, got up at 6 a.m.  0610 132/74/54 120 207.2; 62/53/62/49/

Morning meds at 11 a.m., half-dose of Bisoprolol at a6:40 .m.   

Heart of Darkness.  I've read Parts I and II of the novel, and started the concluding Part III, about to meet Mr. Kurtz. . .  

I finished the book mid-afternoon.  I think it's a novelistic expression of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous lines from The Gulag Archipelago: 

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”

Marlowe, the narrator, is the hero/protagonist of the novel, but the central character is the enigmatic Kurtz, who appears in only a relatively few pages of the entire book.  Kurtz is the mystery man.  He is described as brilliant, poetic, good-natured, and altogether admirable early in the tale, but turns out to be a greedy, self-centered despot by the end of the book, the character who looks back on his life, shortly before his death, and utters the famous words: "The horror.  The horror."  Actually, it appears that he is not only reflecting on his own life, with its cataclysmic fall from grace, but also on European colonialism, and exploitation, of the rest of the world, using the Belgian Congo as an exemplar.  Marlowe is a bit harder to characterize.  He is nowhere near the tyrannical murderer that Kurtz became from his unconstrained life in the jungle, but it's clear he recognizes the Solzhenitsyn duality in himself and presumably all human beings.  He feels a strange loyalty to Kurtz I suppose only because he recognizes his duality, the On the Waterfront Terry Malloy quality: “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”  Of courser, Kurtz wasn't 'a bum,' but rather a king, a ruler of the middle of the jungle where he lived.  The plot of the novel ends with Marlowe returning to the London, "a river-bound imperial city", a dark place on a dark river, which pretends to be civilized but whose inhabitants, at least the powerful among them, are no more civilized than the "savages" exploited by Kurtz.  He returns some letter that Kurtz had entrusted to him before he died to Kurtz's fiancée, and lies to her.  He tells her that Kurtz's last words were not "The horror.  The horror", but rather the fiancée's name.  It's an enigmatic ending to an enigmatic story.  

Among the things I enjoyed about the novel(la), in addition to Joseph Conrad's clear writing style, was it's clear relevance to the morality of imperialism, consumerism, and capitalism.  The Congo was a private property of King Leopold of Belgium from 1885 to 1908.

 In September 1908, Belgium formally annexed the Congo Free State (CFS) from King Leopold II, transitioning it into the Belgian Congo. This significant political shift occurred after years of international and domestic pressure due to widespread reports of atrocities committed under Leopold's rule, which had resulted in the deaths of an estimated ten million Congolese. Initially established as a personal fiefdom by Leopold, the CFS had been characterized by brutal exploitation and forced labor, particularly in the collection of rubber and ivory. However, following the annexation, there was a noted decrease in the most severe abuses, although colonial rule continued to exert political and economic control over the Congolese people.

Reading the novel prompted me to go to the North Shore Library and to pick up a copy of the DVD of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  It was the first Vietnam War movie I ever watched, back in 1983, 17 years after I departed that beautiful but accursed county.  I got the 'redux' version of the film which is even longer than the 3 hour originally-released version.  Will I have the emotional stamina to watch all of it?  We'll see.

I note that today is the anniversary of our invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which I still remember, especially the reactions in the U.S. and on college campuses.  From the chapter in my memoir, 1958 - 1970:

I have mentioned that the Marquette campus was quiescent in terms of the [Vietnam] war.  There were intermittent calls for the ouster of the ROTC units and occasional antiwar letters to the editor in the Marquette Tribune, but visiting the Marquette campus in the late 1960s and the Madison campus was like being in two different countries, only one of which was involved in an unpopular war.  The only ripple on the otherwise calm sea of oblivion that was the Marquette campus came after the May 4, 1970 gunning down of four Kent State students during a campus demonstration against the American invasion of Cambodia.  

                  

More than 400 college campuses across the country were roiled by Nixon’s Cambodia incursion and the killing of the Kent State students.  At Marquette there were anonymous bomb threats that almost certainly had more to do with disrupting final examinations than with any moral or political outrage over Cambodia or Kent State.  Dean Boden asked me, a couple of other men with military backgrounds, and two former Milwaukee cops to stay at the law school from closing time on the night of the threatened bombing until 8 the following morning.  We agreed of course and of course there was no bombing.  (I still wonder what it was he thought we could do if there was a bomber afoot intent on blowing up the law school.)  

It is a curious thing to compare the radicalism and highly activist opposition to the war at Madison and the lack of it at Marquette.  The longer the war continued, the more apparent it became to most people that there was no longer any justification – if there ever had been – for the suffering resulting from the continued American intervention.  People were being killed and horribly injured by the tens of thousands.  The land was salted with unexploded bombs and other ordnance and with thousands of anti-personnel land mines.  The soil and water and people were being poisoned daily by the dioxin and other chemical defoliants sprayed by American C130s and other aircraft.  The war was a continuing atrocity carried on by the American government in the name of the American people, carried on by an overwhelmingly “Christian” people against mostly Buddhist and animist people.  Students on “secular” campuses could see the immorality of the war,  why not Catholic students?  Why did Catholic students sit on their hands while so many Protestants and Jews and ‘non-believers’ were raising clenched fists against the government?

The answer, I think, lay in the Catholic school system and the authoritarian structure of the Church, i.e., American (which was to say, Irish-) Catholic culture.  Most of the students at Marquette and Holy Cross and Notre Dame and so on came from Catholic high schools and Catholic elementary schools.  They were raised on a philosophy of “do what the good sisters tell you,” “do what the good fathers tell you,” “do what the bishops and cardinals and popes tell you.”  Whether directly or indirectly they had been schooled on the poppycock from chapter 13 of Paul’s epistle to the Romans:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.  Do you wish to have no fear of the authority?  Then do what is good.  But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain!  It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.  Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience.  For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. 

How could the Roman authorities – and imperial warmongers of whatever era - not love this guy?   Once the Church got into bed with the emperors after the conversion of Constantine, this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans really came into its own in terms of keeping Christians in line: obey the Roman authorities and obey your bishops and you’ll stay out of trouble and go to Heaven.  From Paul through Constantine through the Catholic grade schools and high schools to the Catholic campuses during the Vietnam War: pray, pay, and obey.  The most active war and draft resisters at Madison were not Catholic or even Christian students from Wisconsin’s cities and villages and farms.  They were Jews from the East Coast, post-Holocaust Jews who, no surprise, hardly accepted the notion that “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”  Neither did I, but the Catholic culture ingrained in me by the parish priests, the Sisters of Providence, the Irish Christian Brothers and the Jesuits, the culture that prepared me for Marine Corps enculturation, ensured that I would not be one to march against the war.  Alas.

 Today is also the anniversary of the beginning of the evacuation from Saigon in 1975, Saigon that was soon to become Ho Chi Minh City.  I'll never forget that day either, not only the evacuation of our embassy personnel and thousands of Vietnamese afraid for their lives as the NVA/VC army enteree the city, but the profound national shame and embarassment over the war we had foolishly begun 10 years before, only to lose so ignominiously.

The Vietnam War was the nation's longest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. Over 8.7 million Americans served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam era from 1964 to 197.   More than 3.4 million were deployed to Southeast Asia, and approximately 2.7 million of those served in the Republic of Vietnam.  More than 58,000 of them were killed.  More than 300,000 were wounded.  Even more were injured in ways that didn't rate a Purple Heart.  Most of us left Vietnam without visible wounds, but Vietnam never left us.

4/28/2026

 Tuesday, April 28, 2026

1887 One of my maternal grandfather Dennis Healy's birthdays

1956 The last French troops left Vietnam

1965 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic,and stayed until October 1966

1967 Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army & was  stripped of his boxing title

1996 In Australia's worst massacre in modern history, Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, leading to a compulsory gun buyback program and major changes to gun control laws.

2025 A sailor is injured when an F/A-18E fighter jet falls off the deck of the USS Harry Truman and sinks while the aircraft carrier engaged in evasive maneuvers to avoid a Houthi attack.

In bed at 9:15, awake & onto LZB at 2:20, up at 4:30.  0453 135/76/50 129 206.6; 50/41/60/48.  

Morning meds at 8 a.m., with half dose of Bisoprolol at 5:45 a.m.  My bladder's really been bothering me lately.  I need another appointment with Urology for another look inside.

I've felt crappy all day, mainly with low and mid back pain.  I woke up with it around 2 this morning when I moved to the LZB.  I applied a 5% Lidocaine patch which has helped, but I've spent way too much time today sleeping.  When not sleeping, I'm reading (and enjoying) Heart of Darkness.

James Comey has been indicted again, proving that Todd Blanche, acting Attorney General, (1) has no pride, (2) has no shame, and (3) will do anything to please Trump and hold on to the job of AG.

I'd rather read than write today, so I'll copy and paste what I've written before about my maternal grandfather, since today may or may not be his 139th birthday.

"Boppa" Denny was my maternal grandfather, Dennis M. Healy.  He died when I was 11, my first experience with death.  We don't know how old he was when he died.  He was born in the Townland of Slaheny, Village of Kilgarvan, in County Kerry, Ireland.  There were 14 houses in Slaheny: 4 occupied by Healys, 4 by Sullivans, 3 by Peahens, and 1 by Finnegans.  House #5 was a 2-room thatched roof cottage with 2 windows.  The head of household was listed in the census as Dennis' brother Daniel, age 30, who lived with his wife Mary, also 30, their daughter Mary, 4, and their 3 sons John, 1, Timothy, 3, and Jeremiah, 5.  The pater families was Daniel, age 75, and the mother, Margaret, age 55, who also lived in that same cottage.  Dennis gave his age as 24 when he arrived in 1904 at Ellis Island from County Kerry via Cobh on the steamship Oceanic.  Years later when he applied for citizenship he gave his year of birth as 1883 which would have made him 21 at Ellis Island.  The 'holy card' from his wake and funeral gave his DOB as April 28, 1887, which would make him barely 17 at Ellis Island.  The birth registry for my mother lists his year of birth as 1886.  Perhaps he was 72 when he died, perhaps 65, perhaps something in between.  I think of him today because I've been continuing to read in small bits Sean O'Faolain's Bird Alone.  I'm at the part where the protagonist Corny is in London at the Irish pub behind which his Uncle Mel lives.  The group in the barroom sings The Ould Ivied Ruin, referring to abandoned homesteads in Ireland and mournful yearning to return.  "There were cries from time to time . .  or a silence for several verses when the pathos of the thing moved them too much, or thoughts of 'the ould land' they might never see again . . "  My grandfather carried a piece of "the ould sod", a chunk of dirt from Ireland, wrapped in a Kleenex in his pocket.  I wonder what became of it when he died.  I remember looking at it once, unwrapping the frayed Kleenex around it.  When Boppa Denny would come to visit us in our basement digs after he had had too much to drink, he would get filled with emotion and curse the English, especially the "Black and Tans" who savaged the Irish during their War of Independence, long after Dennis was already in the U.S.   I vaguely remember him once trying to dance an Irish jig in our little living room, losing his balance and falling into a chair.  He was a sad man, alcoholic in his old age and probably before, widowed early, left with 3 sons, a daughter, and dim but fervent memories of Ireland.

From my memoir:

My mother’s father was Dennis M. Healy  who was from Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland, 6 miles upstream from Kenmare where the Kenmare River empties into the Atlantic.  He grew up in the era of Fenianism, Michael Davitt, the Land League, and the long battle between constitutionalists seeking Home Rule and the more radical separatists seeking complete independence from Great Britain, with Charles Stuart Parnell straddling the divide.  The country had been hit by agricultural depression starting in 1879 and “outrages” (murders of landlords and agents, maiming of cattle, etc.) in the West where the Healy clan lived rose to three times the ‘normal’ incidence in 1880-82.  The struggles with Britain and the Ascendency for land reform, the end of landlordism, and Home Rule and the struggle for complete independence continued well past his emigration to the U. S. and continued through the Easter Rising, the war against Britain and the Black and Tans, the establishment of the Free State and the civil war.  It must have seemed a good time to leave Ireland in search of greener pastures.  He left in 1904, the year the Abbey Theater was founded and Joyce started writing Dubliners (and had his first outing with Nora Barnacle on June 16th, Bloomsday.)  “On the other side,” it was the year Teddy Roosevelt became president.

The immigration records make it clear that the emigrating Healys were almost certainly poor, landless and with no prospect of acquiring land.  Their ‘occupation or calling’ is always listed as ‘laborer’ or ‘servant.’  According to some anecdotal evidence I found on the internet, most of the Healys in Kilgarvin were not native Kerrymen but had migrated to Kilgarvin after evictions by the Earl of Donoughmore during the “Penal Times.”  The barony of Donoughmore lay about 25 miles northwest of Cork City, about 40 miles east of Kilgarvin.    Kilgarvan is now a town of about 550 people in a mountainous area with scant possibilities for eking out a living.  I suspect it had a considerably larger population in 1904 but even fewer opportunities to scratch out a living.    There was a workhouse in Kenmare, down the road from Kilgarvan, and chances are the only options Dennis and his siblings saw were the Kenmare workhouse or emigration.

Dennis sailed to New York on the White Lines steamship Oceanic, departing Queenstown (now Cobh), County Cork, May 19, 1904 and arriving May 26th..  On arrival, he gave his age as 24 as that is the age listed on the “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers” in the Ellis Island records. That would have made 1880 the year of his birth.  Years later, however, when he executed a Declaration of Intention to become a citizen, he gave his birth date as May 5, 1883, which would have made him barely 21 when he arrived.  Adding further confusion to the issue, the ‘holy card’ from his wake and funeral gives his birth date as April 28, 1887, which would have made him barely 17 when he arrived in New York.  It may be that April 28th was his date of birth, and May 5th the date of baptism.  To complete the confusion, the Itasca County birth register entry evidencing my mother’s birth on April 15, 1922, gives her father’s age as 36, which suggests that he was born in 1886, making him barely 18 when he arrived in the United States.  Whether he was born in 1880, as the immigration record declares, or 1883, as the naturalization record declares, or 1886, as my mother’s birth registry declares, or 1887, as the death record states, is anyone’s guess.

At Ellis Island, he stated that his passage to America had been paid by his brother (no name given) and that he was on his way to meet his sister, Mary Healy, who lived in the Lakota Hotel in Chicago.  He had a railroad ticket to Chicago and $6 in his pocket. He stated he had never been an inmate of a prison, an almshouse, or of an institution for the insane, nor had he been a ward of charity, an anarchist or a polygamist. According to the manifest, he was able to read and write.  I never knew of any siblings of my grandfather, but the Ellis Island records suggest that the Healy clan of Kilgarvan was not small.  There were six or seven “Mary Healy”s from Kilgarvan who passed through Ellis Island between 1898 and 1910, all in their teens or early 20s, including one who arrived only two months before my grandfather, in March 1904.  Which was the sister in the hotel in Chicago?  Who was the brother was paid the passage?  I don’t know.  (My Aunt Monica told me that her mother told her that my mother lived with “her aunts” for some period before she married my father.  My father, on the other hand, said my mother lived with her father and brothers, not with any aunts.  Such are the limitations of having to rely on oral histories.) 

The Oceanic was only 5 years old in 1904, built in Belfast in 1899 by the shipyard that was later to build the Titanic, the Harland & Wolff shipyard (of Leon Uris’ Trinity fame).  When launched, she was the largest ship in the world and was still the longest ship at 705 feet when Dennis boarded her for America.   He was a steerage passenger.  There was a lively competition among steamship lines for steerage passengers and, in 1904, the steerage fare (on some ships at least) was only 2 ₤ or about $10.    Dennis was one of almost 60,000 Irish emigrants that year who departed Ireland for destinations outside of Europe and the Mediterranean, generally the U. S., Canada, Australia or New Zealand. 

How did it happen that he ‘left hearth and home’ for a country far away?    Did he go alone?  Did he walk across the mountains of south Kerry and west Cork to Cobh?  Even today there is only one rail line in County Kerry from Tralee to Farranfore to Killarney to Rathmore and points east, all towns considerably north of Kilgarvan.   Cobh is only about 70 miles east southeast of Kilgarvin, now only an hour and a half drive along N22, the Killarney-Macroom-Cork highway, but in 1904, traveling that distance over the challenging terrain of counties Kerry and Cork on foot must have been taxing, even for a young man.

In any event, I know nothing of Dennis’ early life other than he was married to Catherine (or Katherine) O’Shea, also an Irish immigrant, sometime before October 2, 1918 when, as a resident of Taconite in Itasca County, Minnesota, he executed a Declaration of Intention ‘to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince . . . particularly George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom I am now a subject . . . [and] to become a citizen of the United States of America and to reside permanently therein.”  He gave his occupation as ‘pipefitter’, which would indicate welding skills, and 3½ years later, his occupation was listed as “plumber” on the Itasca County birth registry for my mother, but as far as I knew as I was growing up, he was a common laborer, not a skilled tradesman.  Prior to 1922, wives did not execute separate Declarations of Intention; thus, I have no clue about Catherine’s place of birth, other than “Ireland.’  I seem to have a vestigial memory, however, that her roots were in County Cork.  As to her age, my Aunt Monica informs me that, according to Dennis, Catherine was considerably younger than he was, a typical Irish marriage, but the birth registry for my mother gives her age as 35 when my mother was born, only a year or so younger than Dennis.  The anecdotal evidence from my aunt, however, supports the statement on the Oceanic’s Manifest of Alien Passengers that Dennis was born in 1880, which would have made him 42 when my mother was born.

Dennis and Catherine had five children: Cornelius James (called ‘Jim’), born in Chicago on January 25, 1918 (according to his Navy discharge papers); Donald (called ‘Bud’), place and date of birth unknown, but probably Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Mary Norma my mother, born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota on April 15, 1922; and Dennis Brendan (called ‘Bim’) born in Chicago on November 22, 1923 (according to his Certificate of Baptism executed in 1931.   The fifth child must have died at birth or in infancy before the births of my mother and my Uncle Bim, for the birth registry states that my mother was Catherine’s fourth child.   In 1927 or 1928, when my mother was 5 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency (perhaps hereditary) causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production.   The timing of her death was particularly tragic, for in 1926 scientists had discovered that regular feeding of liver was effective in treating pernicious anemia and in 1928, a chemist at Harvard succeeded in producing a liver extract that was 50 to 100 times more potent than simply eating liver.  Pernicious anemia ceased to be a fatal disease just as my mother’s mother was dying from it.  Dennis never remarried.

Catherine O'Shea Healy

4/27/2026

 Monday, April 27, 2026

1877 Rutherford B. Hayes removed Federal troops from Louisiana, Reconstruction ends

1940 Himmler ordered the establishment of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp

1962 The US performed an atmospheric nuclear test at Christmas Island

2025 orth Korea confirmed the deployment of its soldiers to Russia a day after Russia confirmed the presence of North Korean soldiers fighting alongside them.

In bed at 8:50, up at 5:45; 6 a.m., 144/74/50 118 205.8; 46/36/59/42, cloudy morning and rainy afternoon and evening.  This April has been Milwaukee's rainiest on record, more than 9 inches, with more coming today and Wednesday.  😰

Morning meds at 9 a.m.  Bisoprolol at 7 a.m.

Notes from Underground.  I finished it this morning, wondering whether it was the strangest novel I had ever read, and thinking, 'yes.'  From this one work, I see more clearer how Dostoevski is seen as the literary father of Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, Freud's psychoanalysis, existentialism, the Beat Movement, Nietzsche, Kafka, and how many and how much else?  That said, this novella was no fun to read.  Indeed, until the final pages dealing with his realtionship with the prostitute Liza, it was a struggle to stay with it.  It was in the final passages dealing with Liza that Dostoevski developed (not the right word) his main philosophical and religious idea of the redeeming, saving power of Love and Compassion, and only Love and Compassion.  Of course, being Dostoevski, he doesn't provide his reader with a happy ending, one where Underground Man and Liza realize that their present and future happiness depends on their acceptance of their mutual Love and Compassion, marry, and live happily ever after.  Noooo, when Underground Man recognizes that downtrodden, exploited Liza offers him Love and Compassion springing from the Love and Compassion he showed to her, he treats her like shit, unspeakably bad, and drives her away, never to be found.  It is thus that he ends up the guy he describes in the opening lines of the story:  "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased."  

My next reading challenge is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  I've never read it.  The closest I have gotten is watching Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now almost forty-five years ago, in 1982 or 83.  It was the first Vietnam movie I could get myself to watch since I left RVN in 1966.  It's strongly based of course on Heart of Darkness, Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz and Capt. Willard, the Marlowe character.  My feelings were still raw about the whole Vietnam lethal fiasco when I watched it, and, though I wtched it on videotape all alone, I remember not being able to watch it all the way through.  I saw it in three sittings.  From the little I know of Heart of Darkness, reading it will also be a rough experience.  I'm reminded of the madness and horror in the mind of Dostoevski's Underground Man and think I'll find it replicated, in spades and in numbers, in Heart of Darkness.

Catheter Ablation.  I called Dr. Singh's nurse this afternoon to let her and him know that I've decided to go along with the recommended surgery.  I visited with Dr. Ryzka of the Rheumatology Clinic this morning as a follow-up to my poymyalgia rheumatica illiness.  In the course of our discussion of my recent hospitalization, he informed me that he has worked closely with Dr. Singh and commented that Singh is phenomonally knowledgeable and skilled at dealing with arrythmia cardiac problems, and the two of Ruzka's uncle only recently underwent catherter ablations in Poland, and that they felt better afterwards.  I suppose it was in some measure based on Dr. Ryzka's comments that the called Singh's nurse today.  I suppose I am always free to withdraw my consent to the surgery right up to the time I'm in the operating room but I'm unlikely to do so.  I admit nonetheless that I feel some real anxiety about the idea of someone threading a catheter up from my thigh through my torso into my heart, the lower chamber at that, zapping some portion of the inside of my heart, and then pulling the catheter back out through my groin.  I shudder thinking about it.  (I know: Don't think about it. Count your blessings.  A typical catheter ablation in Milwaukee costs about $30,000-$35,000.  I'll not pay anything, because of the VA.)

Last year I wrote, after a reflection on the old scuffed-up shoes in which Pope Francis was buried:

As I read these words, I thought of my mother.  She died 52 years ago, at age 51.  She has been dead now longer than she lived.  After she died, I went into her bedroom for some reason I can no longer remember,  but I remember seeing her work shoes on the floor.  White, clean, but 'broken-in' and well-worn.  I remember seeing them as somehow sacred or perhaps venerable, relics. I was deeply moved just looking at her shoes.  Once she was gone, things that were her's took on a significance they had not had while she was still with us.  Her time was up, shockingly, unbelievably, unimaginably, and so was our time with her. Her shoes, her work uniforms, her clothing, her rosary and prayer book, things that had been so ordinary and unnoteworthy, became imbued with significance and precious.  I think of Emily in Our Town, brought back from the dead, seeing her mother in her kitchen before in earlier times:

Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!... I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.  I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. . . Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?

Now that I'm old and living each day in the death zone (the age when no one will say "Oh, he died so young, before his time" but rather "Well, he had a good life"),  I try always to remember and to live Emily's late-found wisdom. Oh, Mama, look at me . . ."  And to remember my Mom's work shoes.  When I see my beloved wife's gardening shoes collected in the garage, or her shoes on the drying pad by the front door, or her shoes in the TV room, way back in my mind, I remember my mother's venerable work shoes and I count my blessings.  When she occasionally says she can't find her shoes, I smile and count my blessings.  When she speaks to me and shares her thoughts about anything, I count my blessings.  Not always, because I am weak, unwise, and inconstant, but usually.  

The "Emily experience" I described has stayed with me this year, and perhaps increased.  Am I being foolish, or chickenhearted, or dramatizing or catastrophizing, thinking that I am getting closer to Death's Door?  Perhaps, but I don't think so.  I was awake and out of bed again last night, sitting on the bedroom recliner, and experiencing rapid heartbeats again, wondering about them, fibrillation? or imagination?  I mentioned to Geri yesterday that the one thing I never really considered to be risk for me was heart disease since, to my knowledge at least, there was no history of it in my family.  Yet here I am still debating whether to undergo the catheter ablation recommended by Dr. Singh.  Here I am wondering whether, if I consent to the surgery, am I trying artificially to prolong my already diminished life, or am I just trying to avoid the pain and discomfort of degenerating heart failure, being bedridden, hooked up to oxygen, a 'basket case'?