6/9/2026

 Tuesday, June 9, 2026 

2016 US President Barack Obama officially endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential nominee, earning Joe Biden's lasting enmity

2020 US Senate unanimously confirmed General Charles Q. Brown (58) as Air Force Chief of Staff, 1st African American to lead a US armed forces branch.  He was later named as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by Biden, but was abruptly removed by Trump 

2022 First public hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack was held.  After the American electorate restored Trump to power, he said the committee members should be investigated and prosecuted.

2025  U.S. president Donald Trump ordered the deployment of roughly 500 Marines to Los Angeles to protect federal buildings amid the ongoing riots in Los Angeles, California.

In bed at 9:30. up at 5:15; 0530 117/70/31 118 201.2; 62/68/61, off and on rain today. 

Morning meds at 6:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6:20 a.m.

Lest we forget:  In 2016, Trump received 62,984,828 votes, 46.1% of the popular vote. In 2020, Trump received 74,223,975 votes, 46.8% of the popular vote. In 2024, Trump received 77,302,580 votes, 49.8% of the popular vote. What does the trend line suggest about where our country is and where our country is headed?

Richard Haas, chairman emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, on Morning Joe this morning:

 What we are seeing now is a two-part stategy.  One is before people cast their votes, one is after.  The before is things like redistricting, which is going to be a real issue, voter repression, having ICE or other troops around and so forth, making it really hard to reach polling stations in largely Democratic districts.  That's the pre-vote process.  Then you have after the vote, how do you ensure the integrety of the process.  Don't be surprised in November if we see voting machines and ballot boxes seized and so forth, in order to "prevent fraud."  But what we're going to find is local officials may find themselves no longer in control of mail-in ballots and then, . ., this could end up in the House or whatever.  So what we're seeing is a multi-pronged, multi-phased strategy.  Here we are: this is the 250th year of this country.  We are meant to be honoring, celebrating the Declaration [of Independence] and we probably right now are facing, in some ways, the most concerted assault, potentially, hopefully it won't happen, but these rumblings, this is really worrisome stuff.  This is preparing the ground, as you say, for a serious pushback against, a free and fair this November.  So people ought to take this seriously.

FB comment to JJA's post this morning:

JJAis at Lake Chatuge.  Hiawassee, GA 

One of my favorite things ever is lying in our RV bed listening to the rain. I just LOVE the sound of rain on a tent or camper roof - it's one of my favorite ways to drift off to sleep. ☺️🌧️ (sound up 📣)

CDC:   I agree!  There is something comforting about listening to the steady thrum of raindrops on whatever it is that is keeping us warm and dry underneath it.  And forgive me for bringing up YouKnowWho, but I noted that he blamed his meltdown during his interview by Kristen Welker on Meet The Press on the fact that it was raining during the interview, making for a steady background hum from the roof of the Wisconsin barn they were in.  I was reminded of the fact that, in November 2018, he refused to visit the cemetery at Belleau Wood in France, where 1,800 American Marines are buried, because of rain, which might have mussed up his precious hair.  That was where he made his infamous "suckers" and "losers" comments to his chief of staff John Kelly, former Marine and Gold Star father of his Marine son, who was a KIA in Afghanistan.  I thought too of the sound of rain on the strongback tent I lived in during monsoon season in Vietnam. and on the roof of the corrugated steel Quonset hut I moved into later, when I had acquired some seniority "in-country."  When the rains were heavy, as they so often were, it was like living inside a snare drum, yet somehow we all managed to carry on and do our duty without having meltdowns like YouKnowWho had last Sunday.  

JJA:  Trump’s meltdown of course had nothing to do with the rain and everything to do with having someone disagree with him and push back on his baseless lies. No one around him ever argues with him or dares to disagree. He was never able to handle those situations well but now, while suffering from whatever ailment they aren’t admitting he has, he utterly incapable of dealing with it - and especially from a woman!  

I read another tale from Sholem Aleichem's Jewish Children early this morning, this one called "Passover in a Village: an Idyll."  It is about the friendship between a young Jewish boy and his young goyishe freind, neither of whom paid attention to their differences, but only to their friendship, their commonalities, and playing amidst the wonders of Earth and Nature on the one hand, and their adult families and neighbors who focused on their differences, thier separateness.  It' also about the "blood libel" common in Eastern Europe, especially around the Feast of Passover, and the willingness of the goyim in and around the Jews' shtetl to bellieve the libel.

Some Oh, William!thoughts  in medias res.  We human beings are mighty complicated beings, nowhere near as simple, or definable as we are incllined to think.  For one thing, as Solzhinitzhen stated in The Gulag Archipelago, 

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil. "

But we're even more complicated than that.  It's not a question of separating good and evil (which is not to suggest that that process is all that easy), but rather a question of our mental and emotional complexity, our variability from one moment to another, from one day to another, from one set of circumstances to another.  There's nothing static about us, our thoughts, our judgments, or especially our feelings.  What I'm finding so absorbing or captivating about Elizabeth Strout''s fiction is the way she describes this fact about human nature, or the human condition.  I was introduced to her view of our human condition in The Things We Never Say, but I've become much more familiar with in in reading her Lucy Barton novels, and probably most aware of it half-way through the one I'm reading now, Oh, William!  The book is about Lucy, of course, but in large measure, as seen through her relationships with her husbands, first William Gerhardt and then David Abramson.  Mostly it's about the relationship with William, as the title surely suggests, but all of her relationships are discussed in the narrative, and none of them is very simple.  She loves William but at times she hates him.  She has a complex and sometimes controdictory relationship with her daughters, and with her parents, and with William's mother.  But it is mostly the marital relationship, the domestic partnership, that she mainly focuses on in Oh, William! and she reminds me of a book I read in bits and snatches as "throne room" reading earlier this year, Necessary Losses, by Judith Viorst.  Viorst wrote:

Psychologist Israel Charny, in a provocative study of marriage, challenges "the myth that marital difficulties are largely the lot of 'sick' people or those who are not really 'mature.'"  He argues that "empiracally it cannot be denied . . . that the largest majority of marriages are riddled with profound destructive tensions, overtly or covertly."  And he proposees to redefine our average, everyday normal marriage as an inherently tense and conflict-ridden relationship whose success requires "a wise balalncing of love and hate."

Viorst develops this idea in her chapter "Love and Hate in the Married State."  Strout develops it in her novels.   They each remind us that marriage is hard, indeed much harder than most of us are willing to admit.  Popular culture tends to treat marriage as somehow salvific or redemptive, saving us from a life of loneliness or isolation.  Getting married "to the right guy" is "every girl's dream," or perhaps it only used to be.  Young women went to college to get their "MRS" degree to another college graduate.  The Catholic Church tells us that marriage is sacramental, ordained by God, decreed indisoluble by Jesus,  and a vector of divine grace.  Having children is supposed to bring meaning and purpose to life.  And, of course there is some truth in all those traditional notions of marriage, but in reality, life is hard and living in mature partnership with another human being is mighty challenging.  It's often a struggle, not so much with our partner, but with ourselves, our own weaknesses, pettiness, selfishness, pride, sense of self-immportance, primacy, etc.  It's not for the faint of heart, or for emotionally fragile. Strout and her Lucy Barton demonstrate this with quiet, but powerful clarity.

Strout raises the free will vs. determinism isue again in this novel, in a very direct way.  When she berates herself for "choosing to walk out" on william and her daughters, William corrects her by asking  her how much of what we do is really the result of choice.  "When does a person actually choose something? You tell me.  Once every so often - at the very most - I think someone actually chooses something.  Otherwise we're following something - we don't even know what it is but we follow it, Lucy.  So, no, I don't think you chose to leave."  This of course is consistent with Strout's personal view that we have a lot less free will than we think, and with Robert Sapolsky's view that we have none.

We drove back up to Home Depot this morning and picked up another carload of mulch got home and we both took a nap.  Life in one's 80s.

 

6/8/2026

 Monday, June 8, 2026

1954 Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" during Senate-Army hearings

1978 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) struck down its 148-year policy of excluding black men from the priesthood

1980 Comedian Richard Pryor suffered severe burns from freebasing cocaine

2011 BU's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy agreed to examine the brains of 2 deceased San Francisco 49ers football players  for signs of injury 

2023 Donald Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges including false statements, conspiracy to obstruct, and willful retention of national defense information 

2025 Peter Charles Clausen graduated from Nicolet High School

2025 At least 12 Palestinians were killed and 29 others were injured by Israeli fire near two aid distribution sites in the Gaza Strip. The IDF said they fired warning shots at people who had advanced toward its forces and ignored warnings to turn away but claimed they did not see any casualties.

2025 Donald Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard to quell anti-deportation protests in Los Angeles, California.

In bed at 9, awake at 3:53, half awake till 5:03 when I got up; 0530 138/83/58 113 201.8; 62/71/59, cloudy & beach hazards warnings, waves 3 to 5 feet and dangerous currents.

Morning meds at 7:30 a.m., and half dose of Bisoprolol at  5:55 a.m.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Trump's ordering National Guard troops onto the streets of Los Angeles.  Yesterday, Trump also appeared for an interview in Wisconsin by Kristen Welker of Meet The Press.  He claimed again, as he so often has, the the 2020 presidential election was rigged and that the current vote count in California elections is rigged.  When Welker asked for evidence of the rigging, he accused her and Meet The Press, ABC, CBS, and CNN of all being "crooked," terminated the interview and stormed off the set (in a Wisconsin barn.)  His behavior is a signal to us of what to prepare for (but how?) his behavior in the November medterm elections and the 2028 elections.  My journal/blog entry from last year on this date:

From the halls of Montezuma to the streets of Los Angeles.  In this morning's newspapers, I learned:

President Trump took extraordinary action on Saturday by calling up 2,000 National Guard troops to quell immigration protests in California, making rare use of federal powers and bypassing the authority of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom and that:

Mr. Trump’s directive authorized the secretary of defense to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.” In Mr. Hegseth’s post on X, he said that active duty Marines were “on high alert” at Camp Pendleton, about 100 miles south of Los Angeles, and could also be mobilized.

A nightmare coming true.  Trump has taken a bad situation and made it worse.  He has unnecessarily created a situation of armed conflict between the armed forces of the United States and American citizens.  There will be bad reactions from bad people striving to foment trouble, anger, reactions and overreaction.  The arrival of National Guard troops in Los Angeles today is the arrival of more trouble for the people of LA. I think of my very-shirttail relative or ex-relative, Maggie Aquavia, in Sherman Oaks in the Valley.  I think of my old Marine Corps, MCAS Yuma,  and Danang RVN buddy Bob Hillary.  I think of the millions of Angelinos who don't deserve what is about to happen in their city.  Inflaming and escalating the tension in the city by sending in armed troops is asking for trouble, and we can be sure that there will be people in LA who will be only too happy to accommodate him.  We have to wonder whether Trump, Vance, Bondi, Hegseth, and/or Noem hope that there will be shooting, injuries, and/or deaths.  They all delight in showing strength and nothing demonstrates strength over an opponent like killing him does.

The photograph high above, by Jonathan Bachman, is of 35-year-old Iesha L. Evans, a nurse and the mother of a young boy, standing her ground in Baton Rouge, LA, during a protest of police brutality on July 11, 2016.  I was and still am moved by this image of Ms. Evans in her green flowing garment and flats being rushed by three burly, heavily armed National Guardsmen in combat boots, helmets, and body armor.  It took much effort and a bit of luck before I was able to obtain a large print of the photograph which I keep on the table behind my work desk next to the photograph immediately above by Marc Riboud of Jan Rose Kasmir, a 17 year old high school student offering a daisy to a heavily armed trooper outside the Pentagon during a peace protest on October 21, 1967, while the Vietnam War was being waged by other American troops.  Each photo vividly illustrates the great disparity in power and brute force between heavily armed and combat-equipped soldiers and ordinary American citizens, especially those exercising their 1st Amendment rights to peacably assemble and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.  We will probably see something like the scenarios in these photos played out in Los Angeles over the next few weeks.

I can't believe Trump will find occasion to send the Marines from Camp Pendleton but if he does, God help us. 

. . . . 

Of course, I was dead wrong and Trump and Hegseth did send in the Marines from Camp Pendleton.

Geri's distressing voice mail.  She opened her voice mail folder and listened to a call from Ascension asking if she would like to set up a visit with a primary care physician.  This seems like a very impersonal notice that her personal doctor for the last 31 years, Kathleen Baugrud, has finally retired.  Fingers crossed. . .  It was a false alarm.  It seems that it's been awhile since Geri had a "wellness" exam or visit, something for which Ascension gets paid by Medicare, of course, and they wanted to schedule one, to which she agreed.

I made a banana bread this afternoon. 

New readings.  While waiting for the North Shore Library to open at 10 a.m., so I could pick up the copy of Elizabeth Strout's Oh, William that I had placed a hold on over the weekend, I opened my Kindle copy of Sholom Aleichem's Jewish Children and read the first offering, titled "A Page from "The Song of Songs."  I didn't quite understand the underlying relationship between the young male narrator and the girl who came to live with his family after her father died and her mother remarried and  apparently pawned her off on the narrator's family, but all the references to the specialness around the Passover festival, of going to the synagogue with his father, and to the "Song of Songs" and its naturalistic metahors for female beauty were very entertaining.

I started Oh, William, and I'm fewer than 40 pages into it but I'm enjoying it already.  Perhaps "enjoying" isn't the right word in light of what I'm about to say, which is that Strout has a way of getting me close to tears.  This morning it was in reading about Lucy Barton's trip to her college with her high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Nash.  Lucy had left home with her clothes for college stuffed into two grocery bags and a box from her father's truck.  On the way to the unnamed college just outside Chicago, Mrs. Nash had pulled off the highway and driven to a shopping center where she bought new clothes for Lucy, and a suitcase to carry them in.  She told Lucy she could pay her back in 10 years, but she, Mrs. Nash, died before those 10 years had passed.  It reminded me of my mother taking me, on a CTA streetcar or bus as I recall, in August of 1959, to the big clothing store on Roosevelt Road, 12th Street in Chicago, to get me clothes to take with me to Marquette,  We were at that partiular store because Dave Fein had an account at that store and my mother purchased the clothes on Dave's account, i.e., Dave's credit.  From my memoir chapter, "Living on the cuff":

We bought clothing through a ‘factor’ named Dave Fein.  A factor was like an ambulatory bank or living credit card.  Dave had credit accounts with clothing merchants on Roosevelt Road, just north of Maxwell Street. We bought clothes on Dave’s account because we couldn’t pay cash.  Dave went from door to door servicing his accounts.  Every week or so, he would show up at the door to collect a payment on the account, sometimes 25¢ or 50¢, sometimes one dollar, rarely more.  Dave carried his account book with him so he could enter his customers’ payments and inform them of their balances.  If we had no money for him, we would ‘lay low’ in the apartment, not answering the door, keeping quiet and staying away from the kitchen and the bedroom.  Dave (or anyone else) could see into the kitchen from the passageway next to our door and into the bedroom from the steps from the passageway up to the sidewalk outside.  A few minutes after Dave stopped knocking, ‘the coast was clear’ and we could resume normal activity.  The new clothes my parents bought me to go away to Marquette in 1959 were purchased at a store on Roosevelt Road on Dave Fein’s account.

One of the items of clothing I acquired that day was a dark green pinwale corduroy sport coat, which I liked very much and which I wore through college, my years in the Marine Corps, and through law school.  Those were my skinny, healthy days when I weighed less than 150 pounds.  By the time I grew too fat to wear it any longer, it was already almost threadbare and my wife grimaced whenever I put it on.  I remember it now, 67 years after we purchased it on Dave Fein's credit, because it reminds me so painfully of all the love that went in to raising me and preparing me to go out into the world.  I believe my mother was still waiting on tables at The Old Barn supper club in Burbank, IL, at the time, working only for tips, and my father worked on the maintenance crew at the Continental Can factory at 76th and Racine in Chicago.  They lived in a nice second floor flat at 7926 S. Morgan, never having owned their own home at that time, though they had been married for almost 20 years.  Much of Lucy Barton's life reminds me of my own, and some of those reminders almost bring tears to my eye, both of gratitude and of regret. 

Another aspect of Lucy's life that resonated with me was the fact that her mother never told her that she loved her.  In My Name is Lucy Barton, she describes at some length her telling her mother that she loved her and unsuccessfully trying to get her mother to reciprocate.  Again in Oh, William she made the point that her mother never told her that she loved her.  Elsewhere she made the point that her parents didn't do hugging.  All this reminded me inevitably of my father, who also wasn't into hugging or professions of love.  At the reception following Andy and Anh's wedding. my Dad was sitting at a table with Geri and Kitty was seated with our cousins.  Geri and my Dad went to Kitty's table to chat and my Dad held Geri's hand.  Later, Kitty remarked on this and added that he had never done that with her.  In our old age, we learned that each of us had independently the same impossible thought when we were kids, that he wasn't really our father, that we weren't really his kids, that he not only didn't love us, but he didn't like us or want us.  Kitty's theory was that he considered us competition for our mother's affection and attention.  If ever there was a man not cut out to be a parent, it was our father.  Hence my tendency to identify with Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton.  He changed late in life, especially with me, but it took almost a lifetime for both of us to arrive at that change.

Text to Andy and Anh this afternoon:

I went to the North Shore Library this morning to pick up a novel I had placed on “hold” over the weekend.  On the way in, I noticed for the first time the large block of memorial bricks showing contributors to the new library, and I particularly noted the one showing “Charles and Geri Clausen” which made me proud, of course, but also warmed my heart toward the contributors who made that brick possible, you guys.  I can’t recall now the occasion on which you gave us this gift, whether a birthday, an anniversary, Christmas,  or whatever, but I want to thank you again for it.  It means a lot to me and to us.  Thank you.❤️❤️

6/7/2026

 Sunday, June 7, 2026

1965 The Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut, effectively legalizing the use of contraception by married couples

2020 John Prine died

In bed at 8:30, up at 4:30; 0445 145/85/54 111 203.2, 0500 124/81/55;  55/68/55, mostly cloudy today.

Morning meds at a.m., and half-dose of bisoprolol at 5:45.  

LTMW around 6:30 a.m., I see a small bird of unknown species stuffing its little beak full, and then some, with cotton from the big cotton ball we have hanging above the suet cake on a shepherd's crook.  I wonder whether he or she has eaten already, or rather it is taking care of its nest building business first.  Today I need to replace the suet cake and add one or two seedcakes to the seedcake stack.  I'll also add some safflower seeds to the tray feeder because there are hardly any left on it, only black-oil sunflower seeds.  On the other hand, I've been wondering lately whether I want to keep attracting so many mourning doves to this feeder since they tend to 'hog the show.'  They are much larger than the finches, sparrows, chickadees, and bluebirds who also like to feed there, and the doves tend to 'set up shop' on the feeder.  They tend to roost on the feeder after they finish feeding.  Sometimes their presence doesn't deter the smaller birds from feeding, but sometimes they do.  They are not as non-aggressive as they look and sound.  Indeed, some of them get pretty nasty, even and perhaps especially toward other doves. . . At 11:30, I witnessed some mighty lascivious courting behavior between two house finches.  Mrs. Finch was imitating Lydia Lust, the girl with the bust, from the original Bedazzled film. 

We replaced a couple of shepherd crooks yesterday with a new, 'two-winged' crook from Bayside Gardens.  I drove there with Geri in mid-afternoon.  I was feeling the symptoms of my heart failure and PVCs and had kind of a hard time walking from the car to where the shepherd crooks were located.  Light-headedness and SOB.  I had to hold on to Geri at one point.  While waiting for Geri to pick out the one she wanted, I struck up a conversation with a young couple who had only recently moved to Wisconsin and north shore Milwaukee.  It turned out that the young wife was from Chicago, Morgan Park, and that her uncle went to Leo High School.  When Geri and I checked out with our new shepherd's crook, we were shocked at its cost: $52!    If the price had been marked on it, Geri never would have bought it, but we went through with the purchase.  We are both astounded at today's cost-of-living, or, as it's now called, the 'affordability crisis.'  I notice it especially at the grocery markets, but it is widespread: health insurance, housing, automobiles, seemingly everything, including shepherd crooks.   I hope this situation helps anti-Trump candidates in the mid-term elections in November, but I suspect the affordability problem won't be cured by any political election.  We'll see (if I'm still around to see it.)

Cardiac symptoms.  I told my NP Maggie Angeli, when I saw her on May 28th, that my symptoms were getting worse, specifically the SOB and lightheadedness.  They continue to be troubling.  I was short of breath while waiting for my coffee to drip through the paper filter this morning, leading me to think again of how I don't like living like this.  I have SOB doing simple kitchen tasks.  I stopped to catch my breahth halfway from our TV room to my bedroom.  Not good.  It makes me think of my sister and her COPD and has me wondering about her final months, weeks, and days.  I feel again the pain and shame about not being with her in her last days.  Knowing of the morbidity of my heart, the heart failure and 30% PVCs, I'm more conscious of the possiblity of heart attack, or perhaps more likely cardiac arrest, at any given moment, out of the blue like TSJ's floating in the warm water of the Carribean.  Or of RHF's.  If it should happen, of coure, it would be a blessing, at least compared to so many other ways of leaving "this vale of tears,"  

"Success," wealth, identity, belonging.  I finished Anything is Possible this morning.  The last two chapters/stories are about the Blaine children, Dottie and Abel.  It is surprising to me that Elizabeth Strout writes so much about poor people, or more particularly, about poor children and how their poverty during childhood affects them in their adult lives.  Her main focus is on Lucy Barton and her siblings Pete and Vicki, but she also pays attention to their cousins, Dottie and Abel.  This group of 5 cousins grew up together, at least in part, and inevitably they remind me of my sister and me and our 3 cousins, Jimmy, Christine, and Dougie.  We were working-class people.  Neither of my parents graduated from high school during the Great Depression.  My mother worked most of her life as a waitress, and my father bounced (or more accurately, was bounced) from one job to another after the Big War.Jimmy, Christine, and Dougie had only one parent, their mother, our Aunt Monica, who was a long-distance operator for Illinois Bell Telephone Company.  Their father was "Scottie" Cummings, an Errol Flynn look-alike and, I suspect, a womanizer.  We never knew him as Monica's husband and our cousins' father.  I was the only one of the boys to graduate from high school.  Jimmy and Dougie both attended De La Salle high school, but quit before graduation to join the Navy.  Kitty graduated from Visitation high school, and I can't recall whether Christine graduated from her "secretarial" high school.  

Were we poor, or just (very) lower-middle class, working people?  Aunt Monica and the kids lived off her income as a telephone operator, but only because they lived in the lower of the two-flat which her parents owned, and in which the parents occupied the upper.  They never had a car.  We had a car, but lived in the roach-infested basement flat and relied mainly on my mother's paltry income as a waitress.  We sometimes didn't have enough cash to buy food, and had to obtain enough for meals "on the cuff" from Mr. and Mrs. Kelly's mom-and-pop dinky grocery store half a block from our apartment.  Of the five cousins, may have been the first to finish high school and the only one to attend college, thanks to the NROTC scolarship.  

I am reminded of these facts this morning because of reading of Abel Blaine's shame arising out of his marrying the boss's daughter, and rising to the highest management and ownership position in his father-in-law's company.  In the chapter/story titled "Gift", we learn that Abel had his suits custom tailored by a London tailor named Keith, and

When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. . .  But what followed this astonishment was a searing sense of shame, as though Abel had done something unsavory all those years by having Keith build his clothes.  He found himself murmuring the words out loud, when he was in his car, or alone in his office, or getting dressed in the morning. "I'm sorry.  God, I'm so sorry."

Even while he voted as a conservative, even while he took his annual bonus from the board,  . . and even while most of him thought what he had thought for years, I will not apologize for being rich, he did apologize, but to whom precisely he did not know.  Waves of shame would suddenly pour over him, . . . 

One of the themes Strout pursues in her writing is the sense of loneliness, or not belonging, that Lucy Barton and her cousins feel from having grown up in such straightened circumstances (to put it mildly) and having ended up solidly middle class and "successful."  The sense was intensified by the knowledge that Pete and Vicki Barton had not "succeeded."  This is illustrated in the stories "Dottie's Bed and Breakfast,'  and "Gift," but mostly stunningly in "Sister."  It reminded me of course of myself, the feeling of "not belonging" among my higher class friends and roommates in college, nor of belonging anymore to my lower class roots.

I've included in these reflections the photo of Aunt Monica and the 5 cousins taken  in the parking lot of the Family Table restaurant on September 9, 2000, my Dad's 80th birthday ,in North Port. Florida.  It's a bittersweet memory for me.  First because Monica, Kitty, and Christine have all died, and second, because reveals the very close and affectionate relationship we all had and that we had gathered together for the first time in years to celebrate that birthday, but I can't forget that on our as we drove out of the parking lot, Jimmy and Dougie had a nasty fight and that Dougie ended up in the Sarasota County jail that night.  Jimmy and I bailed him out the next day.  Our complicated family.  What complicated families so many of us have.  Many?  Most?  All?  What complicated people we all are.  Good novels remind us of this and Elizabeth Strout, I have learned, writes good novels - not heavy on plot, but heavy on character development.

I started reading another Strout novel, Oh, William, the third in the Lucy Barton series.  I hope to read it and the next in the series, Lucy by the Sea before taking a break and moving to some other author.  I am enjoying Strout a lot but she's a heavy read precisedly because she gets heavily into heavy themes: loneliness, guilt and shame, class, lack of communication among people, even or especially intemates, etc.  She reminds us of our own frailties though not without also reminding us of the possibility of and power of love and kindness in our lives.   She reminds me too that every human being is unique, "as common as a field daisy, and as singular," and that each of us has a story of our own complications, of own vices and virtues, our own relationships with our own parents and siblings and others.  Some express this reality by saying each of us is a "child of God" or some such metaphor.  For some of us, the metaphor says too much, but it's thinking of individuals as ordinary, or not in some way holy or sacred or venrable that made Auschwitz possible, and Hiroshima

Geri has been doing heavy duty gardening for days on end.  We've been blessed with favorable weather and she has taken advantage of every day.  It's hard for me to believe she is 82 years old as I watch her bending and lifting and digging and uprooting and raking and pulling or pushing her garden carts all over our .62 acre lot.  What a woman.   

I'm struck by how many good friends she has.  She is on the phone now with a good friend who lives in Topeka, KS, Rita Burns.  She talks regualrly with good friends who live in Ridgefield, CN;Dublin, Ireland; Pittsburgh & Florida; Urbana, IL.   Who am I missing?  While working in the front yard gardens today, her friends Shirley (born in and immigrated from Hong Kong), and Barbara, a walking and Temple Emanuel knitting volunteer buddy,, stopped and chatted.  She talks with her sons and daughters-in-law regularly.  She talks with her granddaughter regularly.  I seem to have misspent my life, ending up a semi-recluse.

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.  Last injectin of Trulicity before catheter ablation on 6/15.

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. . . . I found the 'button.'  It's actually two dinkiy arrows on the far left side of the formatting line, giving me a choice between "HTML view" and "compose view."   I was in the former and needed to be in the latter.

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 Lucy's panic attack, thr 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.  Emmylou Harris:

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.

 

This is the kind of shit up with which I will not put, or, what causes an old guy to shake his head while reading the morning paper.  There is a feature piece in this morning's JSOnline about the upcoming Milwaukee Air Show in mid-July.  Excerpts:

How much are Milwaukee Air & Water Show tickets?

The air and water show is free. But to get closer to the action, reserved venue tickets are available.  Flight Crew Club Tickets are available for either day for $185.59, after taxes and fees. These tickets include unobstructed views of the aerial performance, a private tented lounge, and a catered lunch complete with beverages. It also includes parking in the Red Lot.

Center Point general admission costs $30.22 for one adult ticket and $20.50 for one child ticket after taxes and fees. Tickets include access to designated viewing areas close to food, beverages and restrooms. Seating is not provided and parking is extra.  Reserved parking is available in the Blue (for those with Center Point General Admission) and Pink Lots for $47.48 after taxes and fees. There's also parking available in a number of downtown lots, including O'Donnell Park, and on streets near the lakefront.  

I've never been interested in Air Shows, or in any form of entertainment in which  men or animals are put in mortal danger to entertain me.  Maybe this aversion started while I was still in the Marine Corps and learned that a friend of mine in Vietnam, a Marine pilot nicknamed "Catfish", who had volunterred for the Navy's Blue Angels, died in a training accident.  I can't remember "Catfish's" real name anymore, after more than 60 years. but we served on different crews in the Tactical Air Control Center at 1st Marine Air Wing headquarters in Danang.  He was a short-timer already when I first got there.  I may have still been in country when we learned of his death, but in any event, I think of him every time I see news coverage of air shows.  I cringe when I see footage of the jet jockeys doing harrowing fly-bys, or even close formation flying.   

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.