6/6/2026

 Saturday, June 6, 2026

1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, 1st US victory of WW I

1939 The ship MS St. Louis, carrying 907 Jewish refugees from Europe, began sailing back to the continent after it was refused entry into America.  Approximately a quarter of those on board would perish in the Holocaust.

1944 Operation Overlord: D-Day began  as the 156,000-strong Allied Expeditionary Force landed in Normandy, France, during World War II

1958 French Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle said Algeria would always be French

1967 Israeli troops occupied Gaza during second day of the Six-Day War

1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy died from his wounds after he was shot the previous night

1972 US bombed Haiphong, North-Vietnam; 1000s killed

1977 The "Washington Post" reported the US has developed a neutron bomb

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

2002 A near-Earth asteroid estimated at 10 meters in diameter explodes over the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Libya, with the resulting explosion estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb

2018 Convicted drug trafficker, Alice Johnson, was granted clemency by US President Donald Trump after Kim Kardashian highlighted the case

In bed at 9:15, up at 4:10.;   0425, 128/77/58 113 202.8; 61/75/59, sunny day ahead.

Morning meds at a.m., with half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:45 a.m.

Yesterday, I lost total control over the Blogger app.  It’s become useless as a journaling tool.  I must have hit a button that changed the presentation on the screen.  The bad news is that I don’t know what or where that button is, so I can’t undo it.  I now see a bunch of digital instructions plus text instead of the graphics and print I expect to see on a printed page.  I’ll have to see what I can do with MS Word.

In Anything is Possible yesterday, I read the story of “Mississippi Mary,” a 78 year old lady from Amgash, IL, or thereabouts who left her husband and family and moved to a coastal village in northern Italy to live with her 62 year old beloved, Paolo.  She was visited by her youngest (of 5) daughter, Angelina, who hadn’t seen her in the four years since Mary left for Italy.  Angelina was deeply affected by her mother’s leaving her husband and family and was still angry with her.  Indeed, the story made it clear that she would retain some of that anger at least for the rest of her mother’s life.  Angelina’s husband left her and their children, claiming it was because Angelina was “in love with her mother,” i.e., so consumed by thoughts and anger toward her mother that she ignored him.  The story is a classic example of one of Elizabeth Strout’s major theme in writing, i.e., that we human beings are unable to understand or meaningfully communicate with one another, even in loving, deeply intertwined, intimate relationships.  There was another aspect of the story that moved me, too.

Angelina said, “Mom.  I don’t want you to die.  That’s the whole thing.  You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died . . .

 . . .  And now Mary had to be careful.  She had to be careful because this girl-woman was her daughter.  She could not tell her – this child she loved as much as she had loved anything – that she did not dread her death, that she was almost ready for it, not really but getting there, and it was horrifying to realize that – that life had worn her out, worn her down, she was almost ready to die, and she would die, probably not too long from now.  Always, there was that grasping for a few more years, Mary had seen this with many people, and she did not feel it – or she did but she did not.  No.  She felt tired out, she felt almost ready, and she could not tell her child this. . .

It's that idea that life can wear us out, wear us down, that life can so tire us that there comes a time when death is, if not exactly desired, at least  accepted as relief from, as we Catholics used to say, "this vale of tears."  In my youth, as a student at St. Leo Grammar School, we were taught to sing the Salve Regina, which if we didn't know it already, instructed us that life is a series of sorrows and disappointments.

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry,
Poor banished children of Eve;
To thee do we send up our sighs,
Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

Elizabeth Strout's writing constantly reminds us of this. Strout has a New England Puritan background.  Her father was a deacon in a Congregationalist church, the descendents of the Puritans, and, although it's not clear whether she is affiliated with any church, her writings all appear to be decidedly religious in theme and tone.  She doesn't focus on God (thank God!), but she does focus on our fallen creatureness: our sinfulness, our vincible and invincible ignorances, our sins and guilt, the importance of kindness, forgiveness, and attempts at understanding and communication.  She is heavy reading.  I felt this especially in reading Charlie Macauley's story (The Hit-Thumb Theory) and Lucy Barton's story (Sister) in Anything is Possible.   Lucy Barton's story in "Sister" is especially grueling.  It wasn't clear to me in reading My Name is Lucy Barton just how awful her upbringing in her parents' home had been.  It became clearer in "Sister," especially through the character of her sister, Vicki, but also though seeing the constricted life of her poor brother, Pete.  It almost brings tears to my eyes.  I wish it had.

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count her many tears
While we all share in the sorrow with the poor
It's a song that will linger forever in our ears
Oh, hard times, come again no more

It's the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered too long around my door
Oh, hard times, come again no more

Though we seek love and beauty and music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door
Though their voices are silent, their pleading faces say
Oh, hard times, come again no more

It's the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered too long around my door
Oh, hard times, come again no more

There's a pale young maiden who toils her life away
With a worn heart whose better days are over
Though her voice would be singing, it's sighing all the day
Oh, hard times, come again no more

It's the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered too long around my door
Oh, hard times, come again no more

Oh, hard times, come again no more

Everything I read of Elizabeth Strout's writing seems to raise the question of free will vs. determinism, the question that vexed Artie Dam in The Things We Never Say.  Robert Sapolsky says that free will is a myth, useful for some purposes, misused for others.  John Calvin said we are all predestined.  In her long interview by Katie Couric, Strout didn't pick a side, but said said that she did think that we all have much less free will than we think.  Why was it that Vicki Barton became the person she became, that Pete became the very different person that he became, and that Lucy turned out as she did?  Why was it that my sister Kitty was the saintly person she was, and I ended up so different?  Why did my cousins Jimmy and Christine thrive coming out of the same challenging background as their younger brother Dougie, who fought with the world throughout his life?  How much of who and what we are is due to "nature" and how much to "nurture"?  How much to "free will" choices we supposedly make every day of our life?  How much of that "free will" stuff is just an excuse that lets us lock up people who turn out badly, the losers in Life's Lottery.

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

How are you? I'm blessed.  I used to hear that a lot in the 2 and 1/2 years I worked at the House of Peace.  Sometimes I hear it at the VA Medical Center, but only from Black folk, not from White people.  I thought it odd when I first encountered the expression.  Most of the folks who came to the House of Peace were seeking help of some sort, food from the free food pantry, clothing from our "Capuchin Closet, medical help of some sort from the UWM Nursing Clinic, or advice from the MULS Legal Clinic, sometimes for money to keep their utilities on, or to pay for a methadone treatment.  But the men and women, usually women, who used the expression generally meant it: they were aware of great blessings in their lives, despite their met or unmet needs.  I never, or perhaps only rarely, heard the expression used by White folks, only by Blacks.  Just sayin'.

I thought of it this morning when, around 9 o'clock, I sat on our patio for 20 minutes of so.  I've written about sitting on the patio before in these journal pages, about what pleasure (joy?) it gives me, just quietly sitting on a sturdy plastic outdoor chair, one that Geri bought when she worked in Jefferson County during the week and lived in an apartment in Lake Mills.  I set on that chair and . . .  live? sense?  look and listen?  contemplate?  medicate?  what?  This morning the sun shone on me.  The temperature was about 70° and at first I thought there was no breeze, but then I became aware that there were different breezes in different parts of our yard, mostly down low to the ground, but some a little higher.  There were eddies moving some ferns while others nearby were still.  At first, I thought the morning was quiet, but then I realized that the air was filled with bird calls, most of them barely audible.  Some were of such high frequency that I wondered if the sounds came from birds or perhaps from my tinnitus.  Several minutes after I had taken my seat and sat quietly, a chipmunk dashed from around our sunroon to within a few inches from my feet, on his way to Geri's patio garden.  Ten or fifteen minutes later, two chipmunks, one chasing the other, like Chip and Dale, dashed behind my chair back to the area in front of our sunroom from which the earlier chipmunk came.  I wondered whether therse are the chipmunks I see feeding on the ground under our birdfeeders.  I wondered too whether the chasing was friendly or one asserting territorial dominance over the other, or wanting to mate.  I had a fleeting thought of my childhood in Chicago when the closest we got to wildlife was the thrill of getting a gray squirrel to take a shelled peanut from our hands, or getting close to the horses that drew the milk wagons and ice wagons on our streets, or the "rags and iron" and fresh vegetable wagons down our alleys after the war, before civilian delivery trucks became commonplace again.  How readily the thought came to me:  How are you?  I'm blessed.  

Email to LOA

Charles Clausen

To:  Larry

Sat, Jun 6 at 10:30 AM

Good Morning, Colonel.  We're at or around the anniversary dates for the Battle of Belleau Wood, or as the French renamed it, " "Le Bois de la Brigade de Marine" where the 5th and 6th Marines heaped glory on themselves.  It's become more meaningful for me ever since our asshole C-in-C called the guys still buried at the cemetery there "losers" and "suckers," and declined to visit the cemetery lest his precious hair get mussed up by the rain,  according to his own chief of staff, former Marine, and Gold Star father, John Kelly.  s/f, buddy.

6/5/2026

 Friday, June 5, 2026

1912 US Marines invaded Caimanera, Cuba

1967 Six-Day War began between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria

1968 Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, shooting him 3 times and wounding 5 others at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Kennedy died the next day.

2018  President Donald Trump's administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their families violated international law, according to the UN

2025 The United States imposed sanctions on 4 ICC judges in retaliation over the war tribunal's issuance of an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a past decision to open a case into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

In bed around 9:15, up at 5:20.  0540 122/60/31 126 202.2; 63/71/63, rain throughout the day.

Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Trying to cool down my coffee before sipping it to swallow my bisoprolol, I blew the tiny half-pill of bisoprolol into my coffee😢😷😧.  I drank the coffee and wondered if the powerful beta blocker would have the same effect diluted in coffee as it would have if swallowed with it.  Who knows?

I have started reading Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout.  I guess it's called a novel, but it's more like a collection of short stories connected only by characters each of whom has played some role, however tangential, in Luc Barton's life.  I'm stuck on the fourth story, "The Hit-thumb Theory," about Charlie Macauley.  Charlie is a Vietnam veteran, the only one in the various stories about Lucy Barton and those around her.  The title of the story refers to Charlie's theory that, when one accidentally smashes his thumb with a hammer, there is a split second of painlessness before -WHAM - the pain hits.  In this story, he meets with his sex worker paramour, Robin/Tracy/???,  in a seedy hotel where she hits him up for $10,000 to bail out her druggie son who is in trouble of some unspecified kind with his supplier(s)???  He had gone to the motel intending to tell the woman that he wanted to end their relationship, which he had come to believe was based on mutual love.  They originally met through a personal ad, and Charlie felt right at home with her, more at home than with his own wife and children, or with himself.  The sex worker originally went by the false name "Robin," but purported to reveal her true name of "Tracy" later in their relationship, but in the motel room, she disclosed that even her "real" name was fake.  Charlie ended up giving Robin/Tracy/??? the $10,000 but threatened to kill her if she ever contacted him again.  Afterwards, he checked into a B&B, where

. . .  he waited.  It would come: the wave upon wave of raw pain after a blow like this, oh yes, it would come. . . . And so it was coming closer, yes siree bob.  He knew what it was, he had been there before, and then it would be over.  And yet: It was taking longer than he thought it would.

     You never get used to pain, no matter what anyone says about it.  But now, for the first time, it occurred to him - could it really be the first time this had occurred to him? - that there was something far more frightening: people who no longer felt pain at all.  He had seen it in other men - the blankness behind the eyes, the lack that then defined them.

    So Charlie, a tiny bit, sat up straighter, and he stared pretty hard at that television set.  He waited,  . . . He waited and he hoped, he practically prayed.  O sweet Jesus, let it come.  Dear God, please, could you?  Could you please let it come?

I had a hard time with this story.  I had to read it twice to get a better grasp of its message of inauthenticity and emotional deadening represented by the concluding paragraph.  

 Micaela stopped over for a short visit with her friend and my former law student Dave Geraghty around noon.  Dave graduated from MULS in 1977, in the same class with David Lowe.  Dave and I schmoozed during the entire visit while Geri and Caela did the same.  I was sorry that the visit was so short, though they were on thier way to Michigan for the weekend, or at least part of it.

 

 

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.