3/18/2026

 Wednesday, March 18, 2026 

My final PMR injection!👏

1940 Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler met at the Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agrees to join Germany's impending war effort in the west

1942 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102, creating the War Relocation Authority, which was charged with overseeing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II

2005 Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband

2014 Russia formally annexed Crimea, previously part of Ukraine

2018 First fatal accident involving an Uber self-driving car hitting a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona

2025   Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agreed to an immediate energy infrastructure ceasefire in Ukraine during a phone call, with additional negotiations to begin immediately on a permanent settlement of the conflict. Putin stated that the end of all foreign military and intelligence support to Ukraine would be one condition of such a settlement.

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:55.  17/9/23/10  128/58/32 -- 207.4   

Morning meds at 9:30 a.m.  Last Kevzara injection at 10 a.m. after more than a year on this steroidal "biologic."  Fingers crossed that the polymyalgia  rheumatica never returns.

Grandpa Chuck says he thinks Iran is Donald Trump's tar baby.  He's B'rer Rabbit and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are B'rer Fox, laughing their asses off.

I wrote this 3 years ago this date.  I was duly concerned then and am even more concerned three years later, with 3 more years of decrepitude.  Shudder.

A painting I did back in 1989 from a news photo of a mother and son outside the House of Peace, with all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart on which they were resting.  When I painted it, I never thought that a dozen years later I would become executive director of the House of Peace and would manage the place for the better part of three years, the best job I ever had.  I call the canvas a "painting," but it's actually a pentimento or underpainting.  I did it with oil paints rather than acrylics and was unhappy with the result, so I wiped all the paint off the canvas with a turpentine-soaked rag, intending to use the canvas for another stab at something worth saving.  Strangely, I liked the pigment-stained canvas without the paint better than I liked it with the paint, so I've saved it for the last 37 years.  Go figure.    

Dementia, Feebeleness, Long-term Care and the Ballad of Narayama.  This morning's WaPo features an article with the title "Senior Care is Brutally Expensive.  Boomers aren't ready."  It reveals that assisted-living facilities "start at $60,000 a year on average, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care (NIC) — and costs go up as residents age and need more care. Locked units for dementia patients, which increasingly are being established within assisted-living facilities or as stand-alone facilities, run more than $80,000 a year on average." Additionally,  home-care aides are in very short supply, and nursing home care for the most disabled, costs about $120,000 a year unless you qualify for Medicaid which requires impoverishment.  Home-care aides for 40 hours a week cost about $56,000 a year if you can find one.

Another article in the same issue is "Americans are Knee-Deep in Medical Debt.  Most owe hospitals."  A third article warns "Financial Risks Grow in Shadowy Corner of Markets, Worrying Washington."  And yet another article asks "Why are so many Americans poor? Because we allow it, two books argue.  Sociologists Mark Robert Rank and Matthew Desmond examine the attitudes and policies that keep poverty entrenched.  All these stories reflect the real costs of our national commitment to winner-take-all Capitalism and our aversion to anything that 'reeks' of Socialism, i.e., anything that creates or increases governmental oversight, monitoring, regulation, or taxation of economic activity, or that in any manner redistributes wealth or income from the better-off to the less-well-off.  I have long believed that this American phenomenon is based in very large measure on Racism, specifically on anti-Black racism.  It has its roots in race-based slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and White Supremacy.  Race-based slavery is our Original Sin and our Persistent Sin.  To continue the religious metaphor, like certain sacraments, it has left "an indelible mark on the soul" of the nation.  We tend to blame the poor for being poor, blame the marginalized for living on the margins, and blame the disabled for being disabled.  We even seem subconsciously to blame Blacks for being Black and Browns for being Brown, other than White and privileged by not being Black or Brown.

What most caught my attention about the articles in this morning's papers was the article on care for the elderly, i.e., people like me and Geri.  We have lived comfortably in retirement for many years now but we know that we skate on thin ice and that with each passing day, each passing month and year, the ice gets thinner.  The statistics on the age-relatedness of Alzheimer's and other dementias are daunting.  Physical feebleness increases with age and with it the risk of falling, broken bones, concussions,, strokes, and the need for hospitalization or institutional care.  Is old age a blessing or a curse?  I always think of The Ballad of Narayama, the story of a poor mountain village with chronic food shortages that it addresses by an enforced custom of villagers who reach the age of 70 leaving the village to go up Mount Narayama to die of exposure and starvation so the younger, productive villagers will have enough food to survive.  In Peter Freuchen's book Eskimo, the author describes a custom of Eskimo families who must migrate with their food sources in the harsh climate.  When an elder becomes to sick or weak to keep up with the need of the other family members to follow their food sources, an igloo is built around the elder who is left to die in it so the rest of the family can survive.  What is the right 'disposition' of us old folks in America?  What should be done to protect them?  To protect their families, their caregivers?  What is clear is that our current policies, or lack of policies, can have devastating effects both on the old and on their families.  With the baby boomers moving into old age, the crisis is mounting, but we've known of it for years and done little, near nothing.  Same with the increasing crisis of health care for rural communities.  How can we be so callous about these dire needs staring us right in the face?  To my Republican neighbors of course, the answer is obvious: if they haven't accrued and saved enough money to buy needed care in their old age, it's their own fault.  If their families can't take care or provide care to their elders, it's their own fault.  Letting the government 'bail out' these old folks just creates 'moral hazard,' i.e., that selfish, lazy people will intentionally not work hard and save enough to provide old age care, relying on the government to provide what they should provide on their own.  God and the Government help those who help themselves.

3/17/2026

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

St. Patrick's Day

1932 German police raided Adolf Hitler's Nazi headquarters

1945 Marine Charles E. Clausen departed Iwo Jima after 27 days

1966 US submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb on the Mediterranean sea floor

In bed at  9:30, awake and on to the LZBB at 2:15.  Rested till 3:30 till weigh-in and out to TV room at 3:45.  10/-7/21/7  120/69/61 111 207.2 

Morning meds at  a.m.       

Congestive heart failure.  This cardiac condition seems to be becoming more of a problem, not in terms of fluid retention (as manifested in unexpected weight gain), but in terms of 'the woozes," all four types of which I have been experiencing the last several days, mainly the sensation of being about to fall down.  I write these words at 4:15 a.m.; let's see how I do today.  I usually experience the sensation when I am on my feet, walking or doing some kitchen or other chore.

Recent pithy comments that say so much:  (1) This is not our war.  Words spoken by the German Defense Minister in rejecting Donald Trump's pathetic call for assistance from other nations in forcing open the Strait of Hormuz.  (2) I think I can do whatever I want with it, referring to the sovereign nation of Cuba, about which Donald Trump said yesterday,  I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba.  Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it.   I think I can do whatever I want with it.  For the past three months, the United States has choked off Cuba’s access to foreign oil, blocking shipments from Venezuela and elsewhere. Frequent blackouts have followed — including the broad power outage on Monday — and hospitals have had to postpone some procedures, deepening a humanitarian crisis that has also involved food shortages and has led to rare protests on the island.

Thoughts from my journal on this date in 2023:

Science, religion, poetry, and mystery.  I have long thought that religion, theology, God, and scripture can only be apprehended, if at all, in the same way we apprehend poetry, with a sense of Mystery underlying all of it, not Fantasy, but Mystery.  I am reminded of this thought in reading Marilynne Robinson's essay in the 12/22/22 issue of NYRB "A Theology of the Present Moment."  She addresses the ultimate question - why is there something rather than nothing.  And she acknowledges "Space, time, light, gravity—all of these elude understanding, radically and profoundly."  I joked about the Mystery of 'creation ex nihilo' when I created this Slogthrop Imponderables and Incommensurables blog 15 years ago as a repository of the then-many comments I posted to WaPo news stories during the George W. Bush administration using the pseudonym P. Bosley Slogthrop: 

"Boz has been a permanent resident of Bosky Dells Home for Broken-Down Old Lawyers since he became deranged pondering what he calls the “Slogthopian Conundrum,” i.e., that nothing must be something. Boz began losing sleep after hearing Billy Preston sing “Nuthin’ from nuthin’ leaves nuthin’ . . . You gotta have somethin’ to be with me . . .” He started perseverating ‘nuthin’ from nuthin, nuthin’ from nuthin’’. His fevered brain reasoned “You can’t take away nothing, for there would be nothing to take away! Ergo, nothing must really be SOMETHING! But if nothing = something, must it not follow that SOMETHING = NOTHING???” Night after night, day after day, for weeks on end, old Boz pondered the paradox – nothing is something, something is nothing – until at last he was led bleary-eyed and blathering from his local Taco Bell to be committed to Bosky Dells where he spends his bleary days and restless nights posting comments to stories in the Washington Post and wherever else he can squeeze a comment. The old duffer's schizophrenia is sometimes under control but rarely so when he writes." 

 Boz's name was created as a corruption of "[Tyrone] Slothrop," from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.  'Sloth' was changed to 'Slog' in reference to a controversial memo written by SecDef Donald Rumsfeld in which he wrote: 'It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.''   'P. Bosley' started out as 'Percy Bysshe' after you-know-who and I changed 'Bysshe' to 'Bosley' after Tom Bosley who played Richie's father in the Happy Days sitcom of yore, ending up with the ridiculously pompous P. Bosley Slogthrop.

But back to Marilynne Robinson's essay in which she bravely works to relate God and quantum physics.  I have struggled to do what she does, i.e., to have some minimal comprehension of God and of subatomic physics.  She undoubtedly succeeds more than I have.  I struggle with her essay ex necessitate, as when she writes: "I will mention one more thing that is known and proven, just another observable phenomenon from the point of view of younger physicists, already put to work in industry: quantum entanglement. If a photon is split in two, a change in either half will occur simultaneously in the other half at any distance—across the universe, in theory. I know that other particles can be entangled. I have no idea what this means. Basically, however, in its nonlocal expression, change can occur in physical objects, the entangled halves of a photon, unmediated by space or time—that is, as if there were no space or time. What are we to make of that? Dr. Johnson’s rationalist boot struck the irrefragable stone, which flew a distance proportionate to the angle of the blow, the weight of the stone, and the force expended. Textbook causality. It has worked so well. But it seems that reality has other options.  Space and time are now being thought about as the effects of entanglement. This is all too complex and counterintuitive for me to attempt to enlarge on, heaven knows."  She goes on, but my mind is boggled by all of this.  What exactly is a photon?  What is matter?  What is mass?  What is energy?  What is spacetime?  What is space?  What is time?  What is God?  I can only repeat what I wrote to start this piece: "I have long thought that religion, theology, God, and scripture can only be apprehended, if at all, in the same way we apprehend poetry, with a sense of Mystery underlying all of it, not Fantasy, but Mystery."

I still feel this.  How can we not be blown away, mystified, by the merest fact of anything existing? A grain of sand, a boulder, a goldfinch, the Taj Mahal, ourselves?   I've often written over the last few years, in these journal pages, that I don't believe in God, at least not the God that was fed to me with my pablum as a child, that was fed to me in my religion classes by the Sisters of Providence and the Irish Christian Brothers, and in my theology classes by the Jesuits and in my philosophy classes by the lay Thomists and Scholastics hired by the Jesuits to continue the indocrination process started centuries ago to preserve and transmit "the Deposit of Faith," entrusted to the Magisterium, or the exclusive teaching authority of the Church, i.e., the Pope and bishops.  Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so, and His eye is on the sparrow, and The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.  But I lit a candle this morning as I sat alone in the predawn darkness, and I looked at it and thought of my sister Kitty, of my mother and my father, of Tom St. John, Ed Felsenthal, David Branch, and even of my Uncle Jim, who taught me how to play catch, to ride my first bicycle and to drive his panel truck.  Am I just remembering them, or mysteriously praying to them and for them?  What's that all about?  Whazupwidat?   It's all a Mystery, isn't it?

Fateful Anniversary.  Twenty years ago tonight, Geri and I were in Santa Rosa, California, in beautiful Sonoma County wine country.  We were there for my long interview for the position of communications director for the Diocese of Santa Rosa.  The diocese was scandal-plagued and for a number of reasons, I withdrew my application for the job.  What I am remembering today however, is not the long interviewing, but rather sitting in an eatery with Geri watching George W. Bush deliver his fateful address to the nation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, "WMD",  and giving Saddam Hussein and his two sons 48 hours to leave Iraq.  "Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing."  We all know what followed: our hubristic "shock and awe" bombardment and invasion, discovery of no 'weapons of mass destruction,' our long and controversial occupation, and the Middle East in seemingly permanent turmoil, with Muslim refugees flooding Europe and elsewhere.  A catastrophic tragedy, brought to the world by the 3 amigos, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.  I remember listening to the speech and thinking we learned nothing in Vietnam.  Now it's 20 years later and the Middle East is still a mess, with American influence diminishing and Chinese influence growing.  The Taliban utterly defeated us in Afghanistan,   Bashar al-Assad and the Russians prevailed over our interests in Syria.  The Iranians are ever closer to developing their own 'WMD.' And even Israel is involved in an existential struggle internally with what passes for democracy on the line.  Obama was largely quiescent when Russia seized and annexed Crimea, remembering the backlash to the Iraq fiasco (which played a significant role in getting him elected) and Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into a predominantly anti-internationalist, anti-globalist party of near-isolationists who have more affection for Vladimir Putin than for Joe Biden.  I believe that much of what has happened in the U.S. and in the world over the last 20 years was set in motion by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policies underlying that stupid "you've got 48 hours to get out of town" speech 20 years ago tonight.  How stupid and feckless we can be.  Alas.

 Trip to the Apple Store. I finally bit the bullet and bought a new MacBook Air.  My most recent one has been booting me off our wifi network at home relentlessly, driving me nuts when I'm surfing the internet, doing research, or writing in this journal. Two previous trips to the Genius Bar didn't fix the problem.  Today I was helped by an Irish colleen named Margaret Rose, who ran a more throrough diagnostics test and learned that my battery was shot and needed to be replaced, and the screen also needed to be replaced because of the right-side 20% of it going blewie.  The cost for those two items would be more than $700 and that. along with whatever she did today, might not fix the problem of the computer disconnecting me from the wifi.  So I bought a new one with one terabyte of storage and 512 gigabytes of RAM for more than $1300.  I didn't trade in the old one for fear of losing photos, text messages with Kitty, etc.  I can bring the old one in within a few days to trade it in for a $300 credit.

 

   

 

3/16/2026

 Monday, March 16, 2026

1968 My Lai massacre occurred when American soldiers killed ~400 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in one of the most controversial incidents of the Vietnam War

1977 US President Jimmy Carter pleaded for a Palestinian homeland

1978 US Senate accepted the Panama Canal treaty

2019 A beached dead whale was found to have 88 pounds of plastic inside it, including 40 pounds of plastic bags, in Mabini, Philippines

2025  President Donald Trump signed an executive order shutting down multiple state-funded broadcasters, including Voice of America, Radio y Televisión Martí and Alhurra, and ceasing grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.

In bed at 9, up and on to the LZB again at 2 with back/flank pain, no chance for sleep, out to kitchen to unload and reload the dishwasher, tidy up counters, and do a load of laundry.  BLIZZARD WARNING!  25/+1/29/13  112/70/58  112  205.8  18,000 WE Customers w/o power.  We're OK so far at 0430.  Last24 hours: 6.7 inches of snow following 0.9 inches of rain.  Next 24 hours: 2-3 inches of snow expected

Morning meds at 5:30 a.m.

Bruce and me.😊  Yesterday I wrote about the commonality shared by Bruce Springsteen and me: loving, supportive mothers and alcoholic, mentally ill, unloving and rejecting fathers.  We also shared a common gender and a Catholic school upbringing, in his case only elementary school, but in mine, elementary, high school, college, and law school (19 years, egad!)  It would be wrong to think, however, that we shared anything else.  Indeed, it's a stretch even to think of our Catholic upbringing as a shared background.  Bruce was raised in an Italian Catholic family, whereas I was raised in an Irish Catholic family, and the two cultures were not very similar.  The biggest differences between us lay in when we were born, me in August of 1941 and he in September of 1949.  That difference made me a child of the 40s and the 50s, and him a child of the 60s.  He was a baby boomer, whereas I was a member of 'the silent generation,' and in more ways than one.  I was struck by the significance of our age difference in reading the section of his autobiography in which he mentioned the impact of The Beatles on him,  It was 1964 and he was 15 years old, a high school sophomore living at home in Freehold, NJ.  I was 23 years old, a college graduate, a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, living in Yuma, AZ.  I was married and hadn't lived with my birth family for 5 years.  The following year I would be in Vietnam.   The even bigger difference between us, of course, is his immense artistic,, musical, and songwriting talent of which I share not one whit.  Another difference is that Bruce avoided military service during the Vietnam War by purposefully failing his induction physical, which he described in his autobiography.  There are a thousand other differences between Bruce and me, but in reading his bio, I am becoming one of his millions of admirers, a fan.  I checked out 4 of his albums from the Whitefish Bay Library yesterday, and will be watching YouTube videos of his concerts today.  We are both old men now, he 76 and I 84, far from our early commonalities, but better late than never.  

An entry from this journal one year ago today:

My journal entries, or daily notes, for the last 2 and ½ years in the  binders, with my holographic chronicle of "Life in the Time of Covid" about Tump and the pandemic in watercolor sketchbooks on the right

Former selves.  There is a guest essay by the novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro in today's New York Times, "I Don’t Want Anyone to Read My Diaries. Yet I Can’t Burn Them."  She relates that she kept diaries and journals for years and some time ago decided to burn all of them but discovered that she couldn't do so.   

I grabbed more pages from the 1990 box, but before I had a chance to incinerate them, a few sentences caught my attention. I was writing about what it had been like for me as a young writer in New York just starting out. . . I stopped feeding more pages into the fire after making acquaintance with the self who wrote them. It felt like killing her somehow, to destroy evidence of who she had been. Maybe she still had things to teach me. . . Joan Didion wrote “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not" 

She added: 

As the author of multiple memoirs, I was accustomed to controlling my own narrative. People would often tell me they knew everything about me. “You didn’t read my diary,” I’d joke. “If you had, I’d have to kill you.” . . . 

I had always thought of my diaries as garbage cans into which I tossed all the detritus: the obsessions, petty jealousies, fantasies, secret crushes, stinging rejections, all to clear the path to my “real” work, which is to say the attempt to make meaning and even beauty out of the chaos of being human. Memoirs are crafted, edited stories, no matter how close to the bone. The decision to include or leave out certain details or scenes or even characters are strategic literary ones. What serves the story? Whereas diaries are, at least initially, dumping grounds. And yet dumping grounds can yield the most fertile soil.

The essay made me wonder again why i bother writing words that I expect no one but myself to read.  Some day when I've got a little energy and nothing else to do (including reading and writing), I hope to browse through the 2 and ½ years of daily entries in these notes ("journals" seems too presumptious, maybe precious) to find out how often I have reflected about why I keep writing into the void, to no one.  I write and post them on the Blogspot/Blogger platform but not to attract "followers," but rather because (1) I could never manage to write as much as I do by hand, or holographically as we lawyers say, and (2) the blog format allows me to include photos which please me, as in the case of my paintings and drawings, or which have some relevance to what I write about.  In any event, the most common reasons I have come up with for composing daily notes are (1) it's a poor substitute for the text conversations I had every morning with my sister Kitty, also my dear friend, (2) it's a way to try to clarify my thoughts about whatever I am writing about, and (3) it's a way of trying to keep track of how many of my mental marbles I am losing.  Dani Shapiro and Joan Didion suggest another reason: it's a way of "staying on nodding terms with" [the guy] I used to be, whether [I] find him attractive company or not."  This is to say, it's a bit like lying on a couch in a psychiatrist's office where I am both the patient and the psychiatrist.  I suppose that was what I was doing yesterday when I reflected on whether I was "a quitter," comparing myself perhaps unjustly though not maliciously to my Dad.  It's what I was doing whenever I reflected on my troubled relationship with my Dad from my earliest memories of him after the War until we became friends, thank God, late in life, or when I reflect how I kind of deserted my birth family when I left for college at age 18, and to the Marines at age 21.  Tom St. John, Ed Felsenthal, David Branch, and Kitty are all gone now.  I don't often see friends anymore and those I do see are considerably younger than me, none with similar backgrounds, and all busy with their own lives, children, and grandchildren.  So, I pick up my laptop early each morning and start writing to myself.

3/15/2026

 Sunday, March 15,20206

The ides of March

44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabed to death b Brutus, Cassius, and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome

1966 Riots erupted in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California

1989  Department of Veterans Affairs was officially established as a Cabinet position

2025  UNICEF reported that 1 in 3 children in North Gaza were malnourished due to the Israeli blockade stopping all humanitarian aid, describing the situation as "catastrophic."

2025   Donald Trump said Tren de Aragua is "conducting irregular warfare" against the US and ordered its members to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Following a legal challenge from the ACLU, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocksed this order.   The Trump administration nonetheless deported more than 200 alleged members of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 to El Salvador where they are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center

In bed at 9, move to LZB at 2 with right flank pain, up at 3 for weigh in, BP check, read some Springsteen bio, then out to TV room.  WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY.  35/16/41/30  121/62/6 112 206.6 Back to bed at 6 and slept till up at 9.

Morning meds at 10:40 a.m.  

From Born to Run, excerpts:

 When you walked through barroom doors in my hometown, you entered the mysterious realm of men. . .  Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon ruled, with the blue ribbon stamped on the bartender's pouring spout as the golden eliir was slid expertly into tilted glasses that were then set with a hard knock on the wooden bar.  There I stood, a small spirit reminder of what a lot of these men were spending a few moments trying to forget -  work, responsibility, the family, the blessings and burdens of adult life.

. . . 

I was not my father's favorite citizen. As a boy, I figured it was just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy within the currents of the grown-up world.  As a child, you don't question your parents' choices.  You accept them. They are justified by the godlike status of parenthood. If you aren't spoken to, you're not worth the time. If you're not greeted with love and affection, you haven't earned it.  If you're ignored, you don't exist.  Control over your own behavior is the one card you have to play in the hope of modifying theirs.  Maybe you have to be tougher, stronger, more athletic, smarter, in some way better . . . who knows? . . . I was a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment. . .

 Unfortunately, my dad's desire to engage with me almost always came after the nightly religious ritual of the "sacred six-pack."  One beer after another in the pitch dark of our kitchen.  It was always then that he wanted to see me, and it was always the same.. . . It was a shame, he loved me, but he couldn't stand me.  He felt we competed for my mother's affection.  We did. . .  [B]ack in the days when our relationship was at its most tempestuous, these things remained mysteries and created a legacy of pain and misunderstanding.

 Excerpts from my own memoir, from the section I titled "Homecoming":

        The Battle of Iwo Jima horribly wounded my father and, through my father, it injured his wife and his children.  To the extent that I developed bad coping behaviors in dealing with him and his condition after the war, it impacted me and, through me, my family.  Thus, in a very real sense, wounds from that battle 60 years ago are still felt in our family.

 . . . .

        [My father] was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”  I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.”  He would not have survived on his own.  In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him.  I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for Kitty and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us.  Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’  She was pretty accurate 

My father had all the characteristics of the combat-induced PTSD veteran:

 isolation from family and others with a ‘leave me alone’ attitude

 inability to handle frustrations or even to identify them

 inability to express or share his feelings

 inability to handle it when things are going well, from a standpoint of not feeling worthy, survivor’s guilt

 lack of self-esteem, great insecurity, and feelings of worthlessness and helplessness

 jealousy of his wife’s relationships and activities, and, making everything worse, and, very significantly,

 abuse of alcohol, ‘self-medication.’

        The problems experienced by combat-stressed veterans’ spouses are now well known and well documented.  I’m sure my mother, only 23 years old when my father returned from the war, experienced many of those problems:

 being overwhelmed by pressures

 having to assume total responsibility, including the tremendous strain of financial insecurity because of her husband’s job instability

 feeling guilty that somehow she is responsible for my father’s rage or anger reactions.

 experiencing self-doubts generated by emotional and job instability of her husband; caught up in frequent crisis-responding, losing sight of her own needs or overall pattern.

 being afraid to say anything to him and not knowing how to respond, frustrated in her ability to help.

 being confused as to whether his problems were combat-related or not and whether there would ever by any resolution of his conflict.

 feeling responsible for ‘making it better.’ having to ‘mother’ or ‘nurture’ him and hence creating greater resentment and irresponsibility on his part.

 seeing him separated not only from her, but also from my sister and me with little sense of family and poor father-child relationships.

 feeling that support is not welcomed by him.

 experiencing emotional and verbal abuse.

 feeling dragged down by his negative attitudes.

 reduced self-esteem, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness.

        My father was never physically abusive to me or to Kitty.  He wasn’t a physically violent man, except for one incident with my mother when I was a teenager..  Growing up with him in those close quarters was so very difficult, mostly because he was so profoundly unhappy, and it was impossible not to be infected by his unhappiness.  He was one of those whose ‘spiritual feet had been knocked out from under him. . . spiritually depleted, burned out.’  He had seen what we cannot (thank God) imagine.  What he had seen accompanied him to 73rd and Emerald after the war and stayed with him, especially in the nightmares.  His drinking made a terrible situation worse.  I’ll say more about that later.

. . . 

        As I look back on my life in the process of writing these letters, I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18.  He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy.  He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long distance call.)  He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972 and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him.  I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well.  Other than the years from our reconciliation in 1995 till his death in 2007, most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959 when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39.  Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future.  Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years.  The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality.  I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests.  If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show.  As far as I know, he had no enthusiasm for anything.  I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car.  It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox games, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me.  I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.”  By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:

Poor Silas, . . .

. . .  nothing to look backward to with pride,

And nothing to look forward to with hope,

So now and never any different.

He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children.  

I have read only the first 100 pages or so of Springsteen's bio, but I am struck by the similar experiences that he and I (and our siblings) shared with our cold, distant, rejecting, unloving fathers.  Each of us grew up to be self-sufficient, functional, thriving adult males, he an international rock star, and I a Marine officer, law professor, and lawyer.  But each of us, when it came to rendering our own life stories to our own children inevitably started our stories, and in a sense end our stories, focusing on our very loving mothers and our very unloving fathers.  It was this commonality, that I noticed in the movie Deliver Me From Nowhere, that got me interested in Springsteen's life, and in his music, to reading his Born to Run, and to writing these notes.

"My Father's House"

Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska album

Last night I dreamed that I was a child
Out where the pines grow wild and tall
I was trying to make it home through the forest
Before the darkness falls

I heard the wind rustling through the trees
And ghostly voices rose from the fields
I ran with my heart pounding down that broken path
With the devil snappin' at my heels

I broke through the trees and there in the night
My father's house stood shining hard
And bright the branches and brambles tore
My clothes and scratched my arms
But I ran 'till I fell shaking in his arms

I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart
Will never again Sir tear us from each other's hearts
I got dressed and to that house
I did ride from out on the road I could see
Its windows shining in light

I walked up the steps and stood on the porch a woman
I didn't recognize came and spoke to me
Through a chained door
I told her my story and who I'd come for
She said "I'm sorry son but no one by that name
Lives here anymore"

 My father's house shines hard and bright

It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling so cold and alone
Shining 'cross this dark highway
Where our sins lie unatoned

 

3/14/2026

 Saturday, March 14, 2026

2019 US Senate passed its resolution overturning President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration

2025  Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata for criticizing Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

In bed at 10:10, up at 5:10.  26/37/26.  WINTER STORM WATCH for tomorrow.😨  131/61/30  115  205.7

Morning meds at 8:10 a.m.      

Throne room reading is Bruce Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run, which I am thoroughly enjoying.   I was hooked on it, at least for now, by the initial chapters, titled "My Street," "My House," "The Church," and "My Mother."  It reminded me of course of my own memoir which I wrote about 10 years before Springsteen wrote his:  "Some Lineage," "My Family's First Home," "My Mother,""Raised in the Bosom of the Church," etc.  His mother was 100% Italian, a  Zirilli, as were his most important relatives and he concludes his chapter on "The Italians" with a reference to "We, the Italians," showing his intimate relationship with that side of his heritage, notwithstanding his Dutch surname derived from his paternal great grandfather.

I will write more about this book later.  I wore myself out at the MetroMarket this afternoon and my back is killing me.😱😩😪😡

k

3/13/2026

 Friday, March 13, 2026

1954, Viet Minh General Giáp opened the assault on French forces at Dien Bien Phu

2005 Terry Ratzmann shot and killed seven members of the Living Church of God, including the minister, at Sheraton Inn in Brookfield, Wisconsin, before killing himself

2012 Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it would no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopaedia

2025  The UN Human Rights Council accused Israel of committing genocidal acts and other war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, including committing gender-based violence and sexual assault against prisoners and the systematic destruction of healthcare systems in the region.  Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the reports and accusations, calling them biased and "antisemitic"

2025  During a meeting at the White House with Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte,  President Donald Trump refuses to rule out the U.S. annexation of Greenland when questioned.

2025  The Trump administration reportedly ordered the U.S. military to plan options to expand the presence of American troops in Panama and potentially try to reclaim the Panama Canal.

In bed at 9:30, up at 7.  36/15/40/30  Severe weather warning: High winds. 25-35, gusts to 60 mph.  Winter Storm Watch, heavy snow & blowing snow, Saturday and Sunday, blizzard conditions.     130/78/57  114  205.6

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  Trulicity at 3:30 p..m.

Gale-force winds (<60 mph) today took down our corner Spruce tree.  It blocked the corner of Country Line Road and Wakefield Court until the Bayside DPW sent over a frontend bulldozer, severed the lower trunk from the rest of the tree, and moved everything off the street and back onto our lot, where we'll make arrangements for its disposal.

Some anniversary thoughts (from a year ago):

First, I was 12 years old when the epic battle of Dien Bein Phu started.  It ended almost 2 months later with an ignominious defeat of the French forces and the beginning of the end of France's overseas empire.  Algeria would follow.  It all seemed so foreign, remote, and exotic to me.  11 years later, I would step off a C-130 onto Vietnamese soil at Chu Lai, 23 years old and without any clear understanding of what was going on in Vietnam and why my sorry boots were on its ground.  Ten years later, Marine H-34 helicopters were ferrying desperate, frantic, fleeing Vietnamese from rooftops in Saigon to American ships offshore.  Our Dien Bien Phu took not two months but about 10 years, in the course of which millions of lives were lost, badly impaired, or otherwise badly affected.  Shame on us; shame of the U.S. 

Second, Encyclopaedia Britannica's decision 13 years ago to stop publishing its print edition makes me wonder about the future of printed books, indeed of print media generally.  The profound impact of social media on our lives in just the last 25 years (Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter) makes me wonder whether modern homo sapiens is undergoing a rapid evolutionary adjustment because of which even Wikipedia will become passe.  What will human communication be like in the next 25 years?  What will learning be like?  The world and Western Culture, or what remains of either, will be unrecognizable.  Sarah and Andy will be about at the age I am now, perhaps wondering the kinds of things that I wonder now.  Will the world have experienced and survived one or more nuclear wars by then?  What will be the effects of climate change?  Will it be a 1984 world?  A Brave New World?  A world run by 1s and 0s, algorithms, and AI?  Is there more reason to be hopeful of the coming world or despairing?

Nostalgically, the Britannica anniversary makes me remember the hours I spent lying on the floor at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue in Chicago, reading our family encyclopedia, the multi-volume Grolier's The Book of Knowledge.  My Dad, with his PTSD, always demanded of my sister and me "a little peace and quiet."  I sought quiet refuge in the thousands of essays in The Book of Knowledge, which also introduced me to the wide world outside our tiny, roachy, 3 rooms in the basement at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue.    

Happy Horseshit, Trump-style.  From last night's late night talk shows:

“The Trump administration Republicans say the Iran war is both a short excursion and a longer war, and it’s pretty much complete and it’s also just beginning and high oil prices are a sacrifice we have to make, but also oil prices are coming down. And also high oil prices are actually a good thing, and we already won but we might have to stay for four days or five weeks, or six months, jump in the Strait of Hormuz for oil tankers because if it stays closed, oil prices that are coming down will go up and we’ll lose the war we’ve already won. Sure makes sense to me.” — SETH MEYERS

“The Trump administration has been clear from the beginning that the goal of the war is stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — or it's about regime change, or it’s about freedom for the Iranian people, or it’s about destroying their ballistic missile factories, or it’s because Iran posed an imminent threat, or it’s because Israel made us do it, or it’s because this whole time Lindsey Graham has been a trickster god sent here to sow chaos by convincing Trump to go to war.” — SETH MEYERS

Here's what I wrote of the "Happy Horseshit" in my memoir:

Throughout the time I was in Vietnam, and for the years of occupation and fighting thereafter, our government promulgated what we, even in late 1965, called ‘happy horseshit.’  One of the memorable lines in Apocalypse Now is “The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to rise above it.”  The Pentagon Papers, the government documents that the Nixon Administration tried to keep secret, collected much of the ‘happy horseshit.’     On August 9, 1965, three CBS correspondents interviewed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk about Vietnam.  Harry Reasoner asked why American national interests were linked to South Vietnam.  McNamara said: 

First, let me make it clear, Mr. Reasoner, that this is not primarily a military problem.  Above all else, I want to emphasize that.  It is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of South Vietnam . . .

Secretary Rusk’s reference to President Johnson’s invocation of ‘national honor’ drew this question:

But, sir, don’t you have to reckon honor at its cost?  I mean, it is not an abstract thing.  It has to be valued and weighed according to what it costs you.  And what about dishonor?  What about the world image that we now present?  We are burning villages, we are killing civilians.  Now, don’t you weigh one against the other?

Rusk answered:

Well, let me say that you also weigh the costs of dishonor, that is, the failure of an American commitment.  And I would hope that our own American news media would go to some effort to present a balanced picture of what is going on in South Vietnam: the thousands of local officials who have been kidnapped, the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians who have been killed or wounded by North Vietnamese mortars and by the constant depredations of these acts of violence against the civilian population.

Nice answer.  Yeah, we’re killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians, but so are the VC and NVA, so it’s all OK.  We’re fighting on behalf of capitalism and freedom in the form of a puppet government in Saigon.  The other guys are Commies.  What more need be said?

It is a sad and hard experience to think back on those days in Vietnam and to re-read the ‘happy horseshit’ of the politicos.  I remember quite clearly talking with other Marines about the futility of the war, sharing the judgment or intuition that no ultimate good was going to come from all the death and destruction.  I talked about it in the middle of the night with my friend Bob Hilleary during those endless night watches in ‘the Bubble’ stinking of Spam.  My tentmates and I groused about it while holed up under canvas during the endless monsoon rains.  We talked about it over alcohol and blackjack hands at the officers’ club.  Regarding the “happy horseshit” in the news reports on Armed Forces Radio and in Stars and Stripes and in hometown newspapers that were mailed to DaNang, I remember with surprising vividness my good friend, from Yuma and Iwakuni and DaNang, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall frequently quoting his high school football coach in Iowa who used to tell his team: “You can fool the spectators but you can’t fool the players.”  The players, at least in my unit, didn’t believe the happy horseshit from Saigon and Washington, just as I haven’t believed the happy horseshit from Baghdad and Washington 40 years later.  A nation does not ‘win the hearts and minds’ of another people by dispatching an invading army of highly trained professional killers to its shores, airfields, or landing zones.  A nation cannot successfully use as ambassadors of good will Marines and soldiers who are always at least a lethal threat to kill locals and often an organized homicidal force.  We do not ‘save villages’ by ‘destroying them,’ whether the village is a hamlet in the Mekong Delta or the city of Fallujah on the Euphrates.  We do not preserve national honor by becoming an international pariah.  My heart aches when I think of the price the Clausen family and millions of other families have paid in foreign wars only to lead to the nation’s policies of invasion, occupation, torture, kidnappings, detentions without legal process, and claims of almost boundless executive authority by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales.  Did we learn nothing from Vietnam?   Is there no limit to the amount of happy horseshit gullible Americans will willingly eat?

When I arrived in Vietnam in July, 1965, the conflict there was not yet a full-fledged American war.  The mission of American combat forces was limited and essentially defensive.  It all changed two weeks after my arrival when President Johnson made the decision to grant General Westmoreland’s request for a massive infusion of American forces in 1965 and more in 1966.   He granted the request for the very reasons that should have caused him to deny it - because he knew that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of effectively governing the country and the South Vietnamese military was incapable of defending it.  That decision on that date for those reasons turned the war into an American war.  The whole world knew of the fecklessness and corruption of the Vietnamese government in Saigon and of the powerlessness of the South Vietnamese military and of the determination of the VC/NVA forces and we Marines knew it too.  In Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, he acknowledges the mistake of not pulling out of Vietnam early.  He wrote:

By [the early or mid 1960s] it should have become apparent that the two conditions underlying President Kennedy’s decision to send military advisors to South Vietnam were not being met and, indeed, could not be met: political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved; and the South Vietnamese, even with our training assistance and logistical support, were incapable of defending themselves.

Given these facts – and they are facts – I believe we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Điem’s assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political and military weakness in South Vietnam.  And, as the table opposite suggests, there were at least three other occasions when withdrawal could have been justified.

Date of Withdrawal US Forces US Killed Basis for Withdrawal

Nov. 1963 16,300 advisors 78 Collapse of  Điem regime and political instability

Late 1964 or

Early 1965 23,300

advisors 225 Clear indication of SVN’s inability to defend itself, even with US training and logistical support

July, 1965 81,400 troops 509 Further evidence of the above

December, 1965 184,300 troops 1,594 Evidence the US military tactics and training were inappropriate for guerrilla war being waged.

December, 1967 485,600 troops 15,979 CIA reports indicating bombing in the North would not force North Vietnam to desist is the face of our inability to turn back enemy forces in South Vietnam.

January, 1973 543,400 troops (April, 1969) 58,191 Signing of Paris Accords, marking end of US military involvement

All of my college roommates, except Joe Daley, would end up serving in Vietnam.  Tom Devitt served as Executive Officer, one step below the commanding officer, of a Marine artillery battery.  The man he replaced had been ‘fragged’, killed by his own men with a fragmentation grenade thrown into his tent.  Gerry Nugent served as a Marine infantry officer.  Ed Felsenthal and Bill Hendricks served aboard ships on the South China Sea, pulling into the port of Da Nang frequently.  None of us was in contact with any of the others during our time ‘in country.’  One of our friends from the NROTC unit at Marquette, Jay Tremblay, was shot down and lost piloting his aircraft over North Vietnam.  Another good friend, John Boyan, flew H34 helicopters for 13 months in Marine operations.  Pat Townsend, Dick Coffman, Brian Fagin, all good friends from Marquette, all served as Marines in Vietnam and made it home in one piece.

On February 28, 1966, I hitched a ride to the Air Force side of the airbase with orders to Marine Air Control Squadron-6 at Camp Schwab on the northern end of Okinawa.  Those of us at the TAC Center were more than ready to return to Japan or Okinawa and there were Marines in those locations who were eager to get to Vietnam, to get their combat zone experience and campaign ribbons.  I was happy to be getting out.  Instead of a C-130 Hercules, I was on a sleek, silver Air Force troop mover, a KC-135, the Air Force version of a Boeing 707 but with no first class or business class compartments and no windows.  After a long wait in a waiting area, we boarded and waited to take off.  I thought about what a nice rocket or mortar target the plane made – big, shiny, and stationary.  It wasn’t moving.  After a long wait, we were told a fire warning light was on and had to be checked out.  We were kept on the aircraft for a long time – sweating and thirsty and thinking still of what a fine target the aircraft made – while the technicians tried to figure out why the light remained on.  I thought, “Wouldn’t it be a hell of a note to ‘buy the farm’ sitting in an Air Force plane on the Air Force runway waiting to get out of DaNang?”  I remembered wondering whether I was going to ‘buy the farm’ when I had landed 8 months previously at Chu Lai.  Eventually, we were taken off the aircraft until the problem was identified and fixed.  We piled back into the aircraft, tired, pissed off and wanting to get the hell out of Vietnam.  We flew to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa and I got transportation of some sort to Camp Schwab, my next duty station.

I left Vietnam wondering “what was that all about?”  “What’s going to come of all this?”  I would have preferred to be going to Japan rather than Okinawa, but I was happy just to be getting out of the Alice in Wonderland, Catch-22 world of Vietnam.  I was 24 years, 6 months and 4 days old when I departed Vietnam; my father had been 24 years, 6 months, and 8 days old when he departed Iwo Jima.   I aged more than 8 months during my 8 months in Vietnam, but not nearly as much as my father aged during his one month on Iwo Jima.  Semper Fi.

 

3/12/2026

 Thursday, March 12, 2026

1947  President Harry Truman introduced the Truman Doctrine to fight communism

2018 British Prime Minister Theresa May said Russia was "highly likely" to have poisoned a Russian spy and his daughter on March 4 with a nerve agent

2022: Saudi Arabia executed 81 convicted criminals, the country's largest known mass execution in modern times 

2025  Canadian finance minister announced retaliatory tariffs on US$20.7 billion of goods from the United States after Donald Trump announced additional tariffs on Canadian metals. 

2025  Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei rejected negotiations with the U.S. regarding Iran's nuclear program, stating that Iran is "not interested in nuclear weapons."

2025  The Houthis in Yemen announced it would  resume targeting Israeli ships because its deadline for Israel to resume aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip had passed

In bed at 9 after experiencing my second light-headedness of the day, almost falling on way back to a pit stop. Moved to LZB at 2:15, and maybe half-slept till 4, with many thoughts of John McGregor, light-headedness at the VA yesterday on walk to the throat radiology room with the therapist. 30/19/41/30   125/52/30  109  206.6

Morning meds at 6:45 a.m.     

The world we live in:

Trump's Truth (sic) Social post on 3/5/2026:

“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!  After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,

Trump's Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, on the meaning of "unconditional surrender", on 3/6/2026:

 What the President means is that when he, as commander-in-chief of the US armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and that the goals of Operation Epic Fury have been fully realized,  then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender, whether they say it or not.

Humpty Dumpty chatting with Alice in Wonderland:

           ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’

           ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things–that’s all.’

           ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master–that’s all’

Wondering whether I should be getting myself a "short-timer's chain." I've had three unusual medical occurrences lately: the two instances of lightheadedness/dizziness yesterday and the strange, out-of-nowhere severe nausea and lightheadedness/dizziness the other morning (Friday, March 6th).  Something strange seems to be going on in my brain and CNS.  This morning, I am experiencing more lightheadedness & wooziness.  Not good.  It raises a real concern not only about falls in the house (especially when Geri is not at home), but also about driving.   It's not the fear of falling that would be a concern, but rather an unexpected woozy lightheadedness, especially on the freeway and at speed.  It happened to me once many years ago, driving to Florida to visit my Dad.  I was on Interstate 65 north of Chattanooga, surrounded by big semis, when I had an attack of vertigo and feared losing control of my car.  I handled the scare somehow and told Dr. Baugrud about it later, with her recommending that I use Claritin pills on the road.  Maybe I should use some now.

I finished This is Happiness today.  It's a lovely long story of life and love, of growing up, growing old, getting sick and of dying, of solitude, family, and of community, of the place of music and storytelling in life, of permanence and transience, of unacknowledged Buddhism and ubiquitous Irish Catholicism, of love, lust, and loss, of the desire of a virtuous but sinful human heart for forgiveness.  It's about "progress" and its costs.  And, as the title suggests, it's about what happiness is.  Can the author, Niall Williams, satisfactorily treat all those heavy subjects in a book of only 380 pages?  I think he succeeded.   My heart was touched by the story, especially about the narrator's tale of the illness and loss of his mother, and about the reconnection of Christy McMahon and Annie Mooney.  Having already completed the book on Kindle and Audible, I'll pick up a printed copy at the library today and go over some of the chapters I want to restudy.  The narrator and protagonist in the novel Noah Crowe,  is 78 years old as he tells his story of the town and people among whom he lived in the little village of Naha in western County Clare.  The story he tells occurred sixty years beforehand, when he was a lad of 17, living with his grandparents and sharing his bedroom and a big part of his life with their temporary boarder, Christy McMahon.  Thus, the whole endeavor of the book reminds me of myself writing my memoir about my early years when I was in my 60s and writing my journal/blog in my 80s, with so much of the writing focused on childhood, youth, and early adulthood.  Niall Williams' writing is fiction and mine is non-fiction, but it's clear he does a much better job of re-creating his hero's young life than I've ever been able to re-create my own.

From Chapter 32 of the novel:

When I did think of it,, I was suprised that Christy that Christy was not more downtrodden by the impasse with Annie, and one evening approaching the village of Kilmihi, where Michael the Archangel himself had stopped, and where every man we met was called some version of Michael, I asked him why.  He explained himself in a single sentence, 'Noe,' he said, and took a theatrical breath, 'this, is happiness.' 

I gave him back the look you give those a few shillings short of a pound.

"I know,' he said.  'Whenever I said that, it used to drive my wfie mad."      

"\You were married?"

"I was.  She left me for a better man.  God bless her." he said.

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

I think of that often.  We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath, and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky, blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.

 

 

 

      

     

     

Geri is at her friend Barbara's house, helping her learn how to do cable stitching for an afghan she is making.  She leads a full, enriching life, which she well deserves.