6/2/2026

 Tuesday, June 2, 2026

1941 Edward George Felsenthal III was born in Chicago, IL

1963 I graduated from Marquette University and was commissioned in the USMC

1989 10,000 Chinese soldiers were blocked by 100,000 citizens in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, protecting students demonstrating for democracy

1997 Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168

2022 Queen Elizabeth II marked her Platinum Jubilee with four days of celebrations, starting with a military parade at Buckingham Palace 

2025 United States Midwest aluminum premiums rose by 164% after demand for aluminum in the physical market increased due to Donald Trump's plan to increase tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from 25% to 50%. 

2025  Donald Trump announced that the recent U.S. proposal for a deal on Iran's nuclear program does not allow any uranium enrichment by Iran, despite previous media reports to the contrary.

In bed around 9:15, awakened at 1:15 by low glucose alarm, and again at 3:20, half-slept until 5:05; 0525 131/68/32 120 201.8; 53/67/50, sunny.

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6:10 a.m..

I ended yesterday and started today reading The Things We Never Say, which has become a painful read, stirring and recrudescing too many memories, too many thoughts, too many questions.  By the time I went to bed yesterday, I had read 80% of the novel, a quick but painful read.

Today would have been Ed Felsenthal's 85th birthday, had he not died on June 23, 2024.  Bill Wiseman, my former student and research assistant, and husband of another former student and research assistnt Christine Giamo, died around the same date.  It's also the 63rd anniversary of my graduation from Marquette's liberal arts college and my commissioning in the Marine Corps, and the scattering of the Notch House gang: Bill Hendricks, Paula Bochicchio, Jerry Nugent, Camilla Wakeman, Anne Smith and I, and Ed Felsenthal.  Tom Devitt started the scattering by graduating early, in December 1962 and promptly marrying Veronica Colby, just as in the following June, Ed married Lynn the week following our graduation and I married Anne one week later.  For a short time, Tom and Ronnie were our next door neighbors as he finished up and I started Basic School at Quantico.  Anne and I did not have a telephone there.  We shared Tom and Ronnie's phone.  It was on their phone that I received the call from my mother informing me of the circumstances of her rape by James Hartmann.  Tom went on to become an artillery officer and I went on to become an air defense control officer.  He, Ed, Jerry, and I all went on to serve in Vietnam, but at different times and places so our paths never crossed there.  The photo is of Anne and me on graduation day with our first car, the Chinese red Buick pimpmobile, that got us from Milwaukee to Quantico, Quantico to Brunswick, and Brunswick to Yuma, the first legs of our long odyssey.

Text to CBG:

I finished The Things We Never Say, appropriately enough, in the waiting room of the outpatent mental health clinic at the VA medical center this morning.  (If you’re interested, I will explain how I got there some other time.  It’s neither very interesting nor dramatic.)  I enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s writing and am a little surprised that she’s a law school graduate and married to a lawyer.  I’m not sure how I feel about the story.  Since it’s set in present-day America, it cuts pretty close to the bone.  She doesn’t paint a pretty picture of where we are in Trump Era America, nor does she give us much hope that things will get markedly better post-Trump.  In that respect, she mirrors my own thoughts, my own pessimism.  Down at the interpersonal level, she doesn’t paint a pretty picture of our own ability to communicate with and understand one another, and again she mirrors my own judgments.  “So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves” and “mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own.  Thinking all the while that we can see.”    On the other hand, she believes in our ability to love others, despite the inability to really know and understand  “the vast, unknowable universe” inside every other human, including those who are closest to us.

I liked Artie Dam and really felt his loneliness.  He stuck me as a likeable, even lovable, guy, and a kind one.  As I said yesterday, I tend to identify so closely with him because of parallels in his life as imagined by Strout and my real life that reading of his woes and struggles was painful.  I was struck by how bleakly Strout painted his world.  He long contemplated suicide, his first principal (another kind, likeable guy) did commit suicide, and his next -door neighbor’s first wife tried to commit suicide.  I was struck too by how sad Artie’s final days were.  The scene with him going semi-catatonic in his classroom reminded me of the ending of “The Sisters,” the first story in Joyce’s THE DUBLINERS, in which the priest was found laughing all by himself inside a confessional.  In any case, what made the story not completely grim and tragic seemed to me to be the fact that real love existed between the characters, Artie and his son, Artie and Evie, Artie and Ken, the Trump supporter who saved Artie from drowning, and between Artie and his students, especially Danny and Rhonda.   I’m interested in your thoughts.

6/1/2026

 Monday, June 1, 2026

1916 US Senate confirmed Louis Brandeis for the Supreme Court of the United States by a vote of 47 to 22, over 4 months after his nomination

1962  Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel for SS war crimes

1967 The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album was released

2020 President Trump threatened to employ the military to quell protests across the country over the death of George Floyd, then walked with staff to St. John’s Church

2025 At least 31 Palestinians were killed and 170 others were injured while thousands of people went to receive aid from an American-funded humanitarian aid distribution centre in Gaza City. Israel denied its responsibility and released drone footage showing armed, masked men firing at civilians attempting to collect humanitarian aid.

In bed by 9, awakened by the alarm at 5; 0515 143/79/33 124 202.0; 53/67/52 cloudy, partly cloudy.

Morning meds at 10:50 a.m.,  and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:50.

I've started The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.  CBG mentioned yesterday that she had read and enjoyed it and I've been looking for my next read since finishing The Scarlet Letter.  What a difference in writing styles between Hawthorne's 1850 demanding prolixity and Strout's crisp, clear narration.  I'm only about 30 pages into the novel but I'm already captivated by it, probably because I see so many parallels between my own life and that of the protaganist, Artie Dam, a 57 year old high school history teacher, who is not without friends and his long-time wife, Evie, but is lonely, who has twice seriously contemplated suicide in his life and the means to do it while making the death appear accidental, and who seriously ponders whether and to what extent we really have "free will."  (Quite an example of a run-on sentence!😝)  He also grew up in a basement apartment, with with sister and his parents, one of whom was mentally troubled.  He also rues that his relationship with his son is much more distant than he would like.  "Every time Artie saw him, his heart broke a little more."  He also 'married up,' and felt some shame about his working class parents compared to his wife's parents.  Artie is a complex character, like the rest of us and this early in the book, he is still a mystery to me, but one I want to know more about.  This particular set of parallels seems kind of unlikely to me.  I have a hunch I may finish this book by tomorrow.

I met with my primary care provider, NP Kali Kisro, this morning at 8 a.m.  Nothing to report, except that I was touched when she told me at the end of our appointment that she's not a praying person, but that she does have some sort of belief in good wishes having some mysterious efficacy, and that she will be sending good wishes my way on the 15th.  

Some anniversary thoughts.  Louis Brandeis lives on in my thoughts for this: 

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means - to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal - would bring terrible retributions.    Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)

Can we ever forget: Donald J. Trump, Defender of the Faith.

 

The mass shooting of Palestinians trying to obtain food from an American humanitarian group.  Was it the Israelis or Hamas who did it?  Hamas or the IDF?  The IDF or Shin Bet?  Or Mossad?  Or a Palestinian gang?  Or the Islamic State in Gaza?  Was the drone footage real or fake?  Real of AI?  What is anyone to do with "knowledge" or "news" like this anymore?

5/31/2026

 Sunday, May 31, 2026

1900 US troops arrived in Beijing to help put down Boxer Rebellion

1912 US Marines landed on Cuba

1921 A large-scale race riot broke out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, later described as the worst incident of racial violence in American history with 150-300 African Americans killed 

1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance" in a Montreal hotel, during their second 'bed-in' for peace;

2025 A court in Guatemala convicts three men of crimes against humanity and sentences them to 40 years in prison for the rape of 36 women from the Maya Achi indigenous group during the civil war. 

In bed at 9, up at 4:30; 0445 145/83/64 123 202.0, 0505 143/81/65 93;  49/64/48, cloudy day ahead.  

Morning meds at 7:40 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:30  a.m.

Summer Spring Winter FALL.  As best I can recall, that was the name of the Indian princess on the Howdy Doody puppet show when I was a kid and home television was still a new thing.  I think of her today because, while doing my required restful sitting with both feet flat on the floor before taking my blood pressure, I read one of Donald Hall's essays (he's a former Poet Laureate of the U.S.)  in his collection, Essays After Eighty, the one titled "Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr."  The title refers not to the large number of doctors one regularly sees after age 80, but rather to the number of honorary doctorates Hall has received, leading a friend to adress him not simply as Dr. Hall, but as Dr., Dr., Dr., . .  The chapter is actually a rather harrowing account of his life after 80, describing a number of automobile accident he caused, and at least one house fire.  What caught my attention mostly though was his description of his various falls, because they reminded me of my daily battles with the law of gravity.

I don't recall my earliest notable fall, but I have photographic evidence of it.  I was about 3 years old and I climbed through a break in a fence/railing around the depressed entryway to our apartment building's basement, where our little family lived, sometime before my dad was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to Iwo Jima to kill and/or be killed.  I fell only a few feet to the concrete below, but landed right on my noggin and fractured my skull.  Somewhere in the basement I have a photo of myself with the top of my head wrapped in tape or bandages, taken my my mom or dad with my mom's writing on the back, "Don't loft [laugh] at me, Daddy!"   

The only unintended fall I recall during my years in the Marines occurred during a middle of the night training exercise around our air control center in Yuma, AZ, when I was still a second lieutenant.  I was in charge of a small group of supposed guerrilla infiltrators tasked with blowing up the installation which was located on top of a small, rocky knoll at the Yuma air station.  While creeping up the hill at the head of my sappers, I turned to quietly warn them that the footing was treacherous, and, as I started to do so, I slipped and received quite a gash on my right shinbone.  I looked and felt silly, of course, and the staff sergeant who was my second-in-command had to take me back to his quarters after the exercise was completed to patch me up.  I still have a 2 inch scar from that fall but what I remember most is the embarrassment I felt as I took a tumble while warning my troops not to take a tumble.

The only memorable fall I recall in my early civilian life was falling out of a tree in front of the Kenwood Avenue Methodist Church, while helping my next-door neighbor Lance Herrick, who was the pastor of the church.  I don't remember why I was up on that tree, but I do recall falling out of it and the zinger I experienced when I hit Mother Earth.  So far as I know, I suffered no serious damage from the fall, but who knows?  Maybe that fall coupled with the fractured skull when I was a youngster set the stage for my becoming as Geri once described me, "eccentric."😀

We have lived in our current home in Bayside for 14 years now and in that time, I have fallen several  times.  The first time was many years ago when I heaved a heavy branch down the steep-ish slope to the ephemeral pond on our lot's western boundary line.  I heaved the branch so forcefully that I followed it down the slope and had to climb on all fours up the slope to get back onto my feet.  Another embarrassment.😟  Then a couple of years later, I fell down wrestling with a large package of some sort at our front door.  A little embarrassing, but again I could get back on my feet by myself.  

Since I turned 80, my falls have been more problematical than embarrassing, because I'm no longer able to get back on my feet by myself.  My leg muscles are too weak and my balance and general coordination too poor.  I fell once in my bedroom doing-I-can't-remember-what and had to call to Geri to help me up.  A couple of years ago, I fell (backwards this time) in the tv room, trying to pick up some pencils I had dropped, hit my head on the built-in bookcase/cabinet, and had some bleeding from my elbow.  That time, Geri had to call 911 and get the North Shore Fire Department to the house to get me up and check me out.  The paramedics offered to take me to the VA ER but I declined.  Finally, just a couple of months ago, in March, I took a header, or more accurately, a knee-er, on our driveway, while taking the trash cart down to the curb for pick-up the next morning.  I was proud of myself for making sure before I went out that I had my iPhone with me AND a flashlight, just in case.  And sure enough, where the driveway's downslope becomes steeper, the trash cart started rolling faster than I was moving, taking me down to the 20℉ asphalt.  I tried to call Geri on my iPhone but it seemed that something wasn't working, perhaps my iPhone, perhaps my fingers, perhaps my brain.  BUT, mirabile dictu, my Apple Watch (the cheap one) worked, noticed my fall, as well as my longitude and latitude, and called the North Shore Fire Department who responded in due course.  While waiting for the paramedics, I shined my flashlight on and about the trash cart, hoping to attract some driver passing by and, sure enough, a young couple in a pickup truck, stopped to help.  The lady went to the house and alerted Geri of my plight while the gent stayed with me.  I told him the fire department was on the way and indeed, they showed up within minutes, got me on my feet, assisted me into the house, checked my "vitals," asked if I wanted to go the ER, and left when all appeared to be OK.

When I was hospitalized for 5 days in March for very low heart rate and blood pressure, I was confined to bed, not by railings or bars, but by a pressure-activated alarm system that blasted whenever I got out of the bed.  I had to call a nurse every time I wanted to go to the bathroom or to get out of the bed for any reason.  I begged the attending nurses to turn off that alarm system so I could go to the bathroom by myself, like a big boy.  They explained, quite properly, that I was, quite literally, confined to bed because of my very high risk of falling which, in turn, had a high risk of a broken shoulder, broken hip, etc., or worse, of hitting my head and getting "a brain bleed, which can leave you a different person."  I was finally told that whether to release me from bed confinement would be up to a professional assessment by a physical therapist.  When the physical therapist finally arrived, I told him that I was lobbying him for release from confinement and that I was well aware of my risks of falling, etc.  After taking me on a test lap around the entire hospital floor plan, he set me free.   I could have kissed him.  I felt the same kind of elation that I felt when Dr. Ryzka in Rheumatology officially confirmed my self-diagnosis of polymyalgia rheumatica and put me on prednisone.  The latter freed me from months of severe pain and disability; the former freed me to go to the bathroom by myself.  Such is life in the mid-80s.

In Hall's book, the essay following "Dr., Dr., Dr.," etc., is "Death."  In it, he writes: 

In my eighties, the days have narrowed as they must.  I live on one floor eating frozen dinners.  Louise the postwoman brings letters to my porch, opens the door, and tosses the mail on a chair.  I get around - bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, new chair by the window, electrical reclining (or lifting) chair for Chris Matthews and baseball - by spasming from one place to another pushing a four-wheeled roller.  I try not to break my neck.  I write letters.  I take naps.  I write essays. . . . My goal in life is making it to the bathroom.

To which I add only, amen. 

Dan and Caren Goldberg came over this afternoon.   Geri had offered some of our backyard ferns to Dan for transplanting and she and he did their gardening business while Caren and I talked about her mother's cervical fracture and her encounter  and conversation with another resident at the retirement facility, named Bob.  Bob had worked at the Milwaukee County Zoo, primarily walking the camels and elephants, and also related a story about falling in a manure pit and having a load dumped on him.  We also schmoozed about her recent read The Things We Never Say and mine of The Scarlet Letter.  We sat on the patio in the sunny, 61℉ weather, with everyone comfortable except me, who was freezing, even with work jacket on.  I think it's not just old age, but also the heart problems.

Geri attended Ellis's performance of Coppelia this afternoon at the Cudahy high school theater.  She enjoyed it, not so much the story, but the music and Ellis's dancing, but she had ants in her pants after a while since it lasted almost 2 hours.

5/30/2026

 Saturday, May 30, 2026

1431 Hundred Years' War: 19-year-old Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal in Rouen, France

1912 US Marines were sent to Nicaragua

1965 Viet Cong offensive against the US base Da Nang began

2023 400 leading AI industry experts signed a letter warning, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority” 

2024 A jury in New York City found Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records

2025 Donald Trump announced that the tariff on steel and aluminum imports would be doubled to 50%, potentially raising prices for housing, autos, and other goods.

In bed at 9, up at 4; 0420 124/75/53 133 203.0; 53/62/51, cloudy, Beach Hazards warning, waves 2 to 4 feet, dangerous currents.

Morning meds at 9:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:30 a.m.

I finished The Scarlet Letter this morning, before Geri woke up.  I wanted badly to finish it because reading it had been such a struggle.  I looked for some reviews of it to see if I was alone in having a hard time with it, and the first set of review I found was in Goodreads, with a heading "The Scarlet Letter Question."  A reader wrote:

I just finished this book and I have to admit I struggled with it a lot.  I found it boring and not nearly as deep as I was expecting it to be.  I could hardly read three pages in a row without getting distracted and putting it down for hours.

Oh, yes.  Other readers used terms such as "far from accessible," "monotonous and long-winded," and  "fantastically badly written, turgid prose throughout."   Others disagreed, not surprisingly, but I found reading the novel to be, to use Donald Rumsfeld's term, 'a long, hard slog."  I read it and listened to it, most often at the same time.  I usually like listening to Audible renditions because it reminds me of lying on the floor when I was a kid, listening to stories on the radio, especially the huge, old console radio at my Aunt Monica's house.  

I thought I had read this book as a youth, maybe in high school, and that I had enjoyed it.  If I did, which I'm not finding hard to credit, I must have been quite a nerdy high school student.  Perhaps it was The House of the Seven Gables that I read and enjoyed.  Or perhaps I'm just hallucinating,  I thought that the story was mainly about hypocrisy, but there wasn't all that much about hypocrisy in it.  Rather, the main focus was on the personal experience of guilt and shame, both by Hester Prynne and by Arthur Dimmesdale.  In Hester's case, the experience was social as well as personal, i.e., the magistrates and townspeople branded, humiliated, and shunned her - not so much for having sex, which she did in secret, but for becoming pregnant and having a baby with no husband in the picture.  In Dimmesdale's case, the guilt and shame were private and internal, springing from his consciousness of the tremendous disparity between Hester's public shaming and shunning, and his freedom from social punishment for the same sin as Hester's, and from his consciousness of wrongdoing in the general moral sense and because of his special position as a clergyman,  Dimmesdale reminded me somewhat of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,  Their sins/crimes are very different, of course, but each was haunted by the sense of guilt. and each could be redeemed only by acknowledging his guilt.  Chillingworth reminds a reader of Iago, insidiously befriending Dimmesdale only in order to betray and sicken him, and indeed to drive him mad.  On the other hand, Iago's Othello was, but for his tragic weakness of jealousy and distrust, a strong man whereas Chillingworth's Dimmesdale was a weak and indeed pathetic man, even in the most pejorative sense of the word.  The strongest and most admirable character in the story is Hester.  She is the only mensch, although her daughter Pearl may have turned out OK as a rich adult.  She wasn't exactly an ideal child. 

Last year on this date, I was thinking about music, and especially about

Brandi Carlile.  I'm a big fan.  One of the reasons is this song, "Everytime I Hear That Song," which she wrote with her longtime collaborators, Phil and Tim Hanseroth.  Phil is also Brandi's brother-in-law, having married her younger sister, Tiffany.  They all reside in homes on Brandi's land in the State of Washington, home state of all of them.  Brandi is a lesbian and has been married since 2012 to Catherine Shepherd, with whom she has two daughters.

A love song was playing on the radio / It made me kind of sad because it made me think of you

And I wonder how you're doing, but I wish I didn't care / Because I gave you all I had and got the worst of you

[Chorus]

By the way, I forgive you / After all, maybe I should thank you

For giving me what I've found / Cause without you around

I've been doing just fine / Except for any time I hear that song (Ooh)

And didn't it break your heart / When you watched my smile fading?

Did it ever cross your mind / That one day the tables would be turned?

They told me the best revenge / Would be a life well-lived

And the strongest one that holds / Would be the hardest one to earn

[Chorus]

When I woke up in the morning / I was choking on some words

There were things unsaid between us / There were things you never told

That's twice you broke my heart now / The first was way back when

And to know you're still unhappy / Only makes it break again. 

Carlile and other songwriters are poets, and the ones who sing their own songs (and others') are troubadours. It was great that Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.  Power to the people!  I admire and appreciate so many great songwriters and lyricists, and probably many not-so-great ones.  I love old pop classics, with Sophisticated Lady at the top of my list (lyrics by Mitchell Parish, born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky), followed by hundreds of others.  I love country and western classics, written by poets named Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson.  Unlike so much of what is passed off as modern poetry, the poetic lyrics of these songwriters are meant to be understood by everybody, Joe Lunchbucket and Betty Babuska.  It's poetry about love and loss, God and Man, betrayal, addiction, heartache, homelessness and restlessness, loneliness, family and friends - the most basic elements of life.  The poems are meant to be sung, not read, and heard, hopefully by men and women who will be moved by them as Brandi Carlile sings "any time I hear that song."  We have a perfect marriage of lyrics and music, the emotional pull or punch of the song is irresistible, as it is with Sophisticated Lady and, thankfully, so many other great songs/poems.  As I write these words, I think of the tribute Brandi Carlile gave on the death of her friend John Prine, singing his sad, simple, and beautiful song, Hello, In There.  I think too of another sad, simple, and beautiful song that I always associate with war and the loss of friends, My Buddy.  I am powerfully moved by powerful poetry, like Yeats's Vacillation, and Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father, Kenyon's Otherwise, and Maggie Smith's Good Bones, and no less moved by powerful songs, poems in their own right.  I am surprised by how easily I am emotionally moved by music in my old age, much more than when I was younger.  Any orchestral concert or ballet performance involving the concerted efforts of a great many people will do it, but so doew watching the 2021 "Official Music Video" of Janis Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee, not only because of her great recording of Kris Kristofferason's great song but also becasue of its reminder of her death, for which I can't come up with a fitting adjective.

I wonder if everyone, or at least most of us, have a former romantic partner whom we identify with a song.  I wonder too if I like Brandi's 'Everytime I Hear That Song' because it reminds of my two past love interests and songs I don't like to hear because they remind me of 'what might have been.'  The earlier was my First True Love Charlene, with whom I identify Tommy Edwards' It's All In The Game and even more, The Folks Who Live On The Hill.  The second was my first spouse Anne with whom I identify My Funny Valentine.  Each of them lives on in my memory and I think of them, in very different ways,  whenever I hear "our songs."   For decades, I truly carried a torch for Charlene because, I suppose, of the shocking way in which our relationship ended, one of the great mysteries in my life and something from which I never experienced "closure."  All of which is to say that I've never known why our two year love affair ended, why she dumped me while I was away on acive duty in the Navy.  I still remember the deep hurt however and am reminded of it whenever I hear Tommy Edwards crooning the songs we danced and 'made out' to.  With Anne the ending of our marriage was a long time coming and no surprise to me, though it was to her, so when I hear My Funny Valentine, it hurts only because it reminds me of our failures, especially my own failures, to face up to challenges in our marriage long before we separated, starting during my time in the Marine Corps.  It was more than 65 years ago that Charlene dumped me, a lifetime, and more than 40 years since Anne and I separated, yet I still have  reactions to songs that were part of our lives.  Music hath charms, but also barbs, as Brandi Carlile's song so clearly reminds us.

5/29/2026

 Friday, May 29, 2026

1916 US Marines invaded the Dominican Republic, staying until 1924

1954 Pope Pius XII issued a holy declaration canonizing former Pope Pius X as a saint 

2025 Israel announced 22 new settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, the biggest expansion in decades.

2025  Donald Trump commuted the federal prison sentence of Larry Hoover, the founder of the Chicago street gang Gangster Disciples, who was sentenced to six life sentences on conspiracy, extortion, drug and other criminal charges in the 1990s.

In bed by 9:30, awake and up around 4:45; 0515 136/78/54 87 203.4; 48/71/45, sunny day ahead.

Morning meds at 8:45 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6 a.m.

The Orange by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—

The size of it made us all laugh.

I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—

They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,

As ordinary things often do

                                                                                                        Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the                                                                                                                     park.

                                                                                                        This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

                                                                                                        The rest of the day was quite easy.

                                                                                                        I did all the jobs on my list

                                                                                                        And enjoyed them and had some time                                                                                                                         over.

                                                                                                        I love you. I’m glad I exist.

I had intended to skip writing today, a day off, and to enter only some poetry and favored images, but while skimming an article in this morning's Wall Street Journal about Vladimir Putin's quest for longevity, I noticed this:

Average male life expectancy in Russia today is about 68 years, according to official statistics, compared with roughly 76 in the U.S. and over 80 across much of Western Europe.

For Africa, it is 62 years.  These numbers make me more conscious of the fact that I'm playing with house money at 84.   When I was born in 1941, I believe my life expectancy was about 63.  No wonder I'm falling apart.

5/28/2026

 Thursday, May 28, 2026

1431 Joan of Arc was accused of relapsing into heresy by donning male clothing again, providing justification for her execution

1830 US President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, a key law leading to the forced removal of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes out of Georgia and surrounding states, setting the stage for the Cherokee Trail of Tears

1968 Senator Eugene McCarthy won Democratic presidential primary in Oregon

1972 White House "plumbers" first broke in at the Democratic National Headquarters and installed listening devices at Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C.

1996 US President Bill Clinton's former business partners in the Whitewater land deal, James McDougal, Susan McDougal, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, were convicted of fraud

2021 Discovery of a mass grave with the remains of 215 children from Kamloops Indian Residential School was announced by First Nation in British Columbia, Canada 

2024 The Pope apologised for using a homophobic term in a private assembly of Italian bishops, where he reconfirmed the churches ban on gay priests 

2025 Three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of International Trade unanimously ruled President Donald Trump exceeded his authority in using the International Emergency Economic  Powers Act of 1977 to justify his "Liberation Day" tariffs; administration immediately appealed

In bed at 9:15, awake around 3:30, onto LZB, up by 4; 0420 144 (130)/77/55. 120 203.5; 48/38/62/48, sunny day ahead. 

Morning meds at 9 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:10 a.m.  

I had my appointment with NP Maggie Angeli this afternoon, and Geri was present also for most of it.  By the end of it, I had resolved to go through with the catheter ablation.  I will so advise Nurse Lisa tomorrow unless I send her a secure message today.  Among the things I learned was that I am not 'frail' compared to many of the patients who undergo ablations, many of whom are not outpatients as I will be but rather are not only in-patients at the time of the procedure, but in the ICU.  I also learned that the question I asked ChatGPT was based on an incorrect assumption, i.e., that the procedure is for ventricular tachycardia.  Rather, it is for PVC, or premature ventricular contraction.  My blood test readings were all good: potassium, magnesium, and some cardiac-relevent BNP.  So it's off to the races on the 15th.  I still dread it simply because of the nature of the assault on my body.  I'm reminded that, absent consent and its performance by a state-licensed professional, the procedure would be a crime, like all surgeries.   Nasty, icky in the extreme, but well-purposed and hopefully beneficial in results.  Fingers crossed.   Maggie is terrific.  She reallly knows her stuff and really does her homework.  Good-hearted on top of all that.   

Another experience at the VA.  While sitting in the waiting room of the Congestive Heart Failure clinic, I couldn't help overhearing the conversation between Nurse Michelle and the veteran/patient on the other side of the room divider.  They were talking about the fact that the veteran had suffered the loss of his mother and of some siblings within the last couple of years.  When they finished talking, the veteran came out to the waiting area while Michelle went to brief NP Maggie on his situation before returning to bring him to her examination room.  I mentioned to the vet that I overheard the conversation about his losses, and told him that I was sorry for his losses, that life is hard enough as it is without the loss of people we love.  That led to further conversation between the two of us about our families and about family members that each of us had lost.  While we were engaged in a heartfelt conversation, Michelle returned to the space to get the vet and take him to Maggie, but when she got to the door, she saw that we were engaged in that conversation.  She stopped in the doorway and waited.  She clearly didn't want to interrupt that heartfelt conversation between two strangers, me in my mid 80s, he considerably younger, me White and he Black.  When we finished, my fellow vet stood up, came over to shake hands, and asked me my name which I gave him, and I asked his name, which was "Mike."  I encouraged him to take advantage of whatever resources the VA might have available for him and he told me he had an appointment with a VA chaplain.  We thanked each other and wished each other good luck.  It was only then that Nurse Michellle stepped into the room to lead Mike to Maggie's room.  I was moved by the experience, both the conversation with Mike and Michelle's thoughtfulness and sensitivity in reading the situation and waiting for our conversation to be completed before carrying on with her business.  

After the meeting between Maggie, Geri, and me was completed, we proceeded to the elevators where I complimented another old vet on his tall walking stick.  He complemented my cane.  He was Black and I had a hard time understanding all that he said to us, but I heard him say that at his church, folks called his walking stick his Moses stick.  I told him the story of my friend Father Matthew Gottschalk at St. Francis of Assisi church at 4th and Brown streets, who, back in the day when Capuchin friars all wore the long brown Franciscan robes and had long beards (pre-Vatican II), children in the neighborhood would see Fr. Matthew coming down the street on his daily walks, and would run into their homes, shouting "Mama, mama, Jesus's coming!"  It turned out the gentleman attended St. Francis Grammar School, back in the day when it was still operating, before I joined the parish.  The whole encounter between me and him lasted only a few mintues, but it was a few minutes of human contact between two men who were strangers to each other, making caring and respectful contact, just as Mike and I had done earlier.  I left the hospital thinking, as I so often have, that things happen there that surely don't happen, at least on any regular basis, at other hospitals, good things, and it's because of what all the patients share, i.e., that we're all veterans.  Some are White, some are Black, some are Hispanic, Asian, or 'other.'  Some are well-off and many are not.  Some are highly educated and others are not.  Some have all their limbs and faculties, while others don't.  Some are on their last legs and others have a way to go, but everyone is a military/naval veteran and that fact removes barriers that would keep all of us strangers in other settings, separate from one another, ships passing in the night.  It's one of the reasons why I've come to love the place, despite its imperfections and challenges.  As I write this, I'm thankful for Maggie, Michelle, Mike, and 'Moses.'  And to Nurse Lisa who called me yesterday.  And to the VA.

5/27/2026

 Wednesday, May 27, 2026

2012 A NATO airstrike in Afghanistan killed a family of eight, including six childr

2025   The National Assembly of Vietnam begins deliberations on a government proposal to end the death penalty for some offences, including drug trafficking and some national security crimes, replacing them with life in prison without parole. 

In bed at 9:15, awake around 3:30, up at 3:55; 0410 133/77/57 65 204.8; 57/69/54, mostly sunny day ahead, BEACH HAZARD WARNING, high waves 3 to 6 feet high, dangerous currents.  

Morning meds at 8:45 a.m.,  and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 4:35 a.m.

I woke up this morning reliving my conversation with Nurse Lisa yesterday afternoon, thinking of another in-patient hospital stay, even if only an overnight, of Zeke Emanuel and of Jack Levine.

During my pre-BP flat-footed rest, I started the chapter titled "The Leech" in The Scarlet Letter, wondering why Hawthorne characterized Roget Chillingworth, the 'wronged husband,' the 'cuckhold', the way he did, and wondering too why he treated Hester Prynne's sin as harshly as he did.  Chillingworth is the monster of the story, physically and morally deformed, seemingly having only one purpose in life, that of outing the identify of Hester's lover and the father of Pearl, and of subjecting him to a punishment similar to Hester's.  I'm wondering why Hawthorne creates the little love-child Pearl the way he does, as the literal embodiment of Hester's sin, physically beautiful, but wilful, with none of the self-discipine, or I suppose I should say, social discipline of the Puritan children in the town, and dressed in flamboyant clothing sewn by his disgraced mother, again separating her from the blacks and grays worn by the other children.  I'm wondering too how Hawthorne views Hester's disastrous sin, how he views her relationship with Reverend Dimmesdale, how he thinks of sexual relations between men and women generally.  Was sex to him something dirty or something sacred?  Were Hester and Dimmesdale just irresponsible, irrreligious pleasure pursuers when they created Pearl, or did they share a much. more meaningful relationship?  

The story is set in 17th century Massachusetts, in a Puritan community, but it reminds me of 20th century Ireland, and even of 1940s and 1950s Chicago's Catholic communities and their sexual mores.  It reminds me of the notorious mothers and babies home in Ireland.  From Wikipedia:

Mother and Baby Homes were founded in Ireland in the 1920s, to house unmarried mothers and their children, so excluding them from the rest of society. At least 12 homes were run by Roman Catholic nuns, three of which incorporated Magdalene Laundries, which operated as workhouses, forcing the women in them to do exhausting and unpaid work. The mothers and their small children are now known to have been physically and mentally abused by the nuns.

Deaths and misconduct in homes in the Republic of Ireland

The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and certain related matters was established in 2015 by the Irish government to investigate deaths and misconduct from the 1920s to the end of the 1980s in mother and baby homes in the Republic of Ireland. The homes were mostly run by nuns. During this period, 57,000 babies were born to girls and women who resided within the 18 institutions investigated. The mortality rate for the babies born—15 per cent—was never raised as a cause for concern by the government or the Catholic Church. In particular, 973 children died at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home (in Tuam, County Galway), according to the commission. It reported that a number of the children had been discovered inside an old sewage tank. Only 50 records of burials at Tuam are extant. The Irish government formally apologised in January 2021.  

Mostly though, it reminds me of the Irish Catholic, i.e., American Catholic Church's obsession with sins of the flesh.  From my memoir:

 Father Devereaux was a younger middle aged priest who had a friendly manner, too friendly as I reflect on it.  He was the confessor of choice for pubescent boys concerned about going to Hell for eternity because of what was happening with their penises and the impure thoughts that plagued their minds and troubled their souls (because they liked them.)  Father Devereaux would hear your confession about anywhere and anytime by taking you into a corner or a vestibule or some semi-private place, throwing his arm around your shoulder, head or neck like a grappling hook, pulling you tightly into his chest, listening to you acknowledge your impure thoughts and deeds and then shriving you in return for three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and your resolve not to sin again (fat chance.)  These physically close encounters of a weird kind with Father Devereaux were unhealthy to say the least.  As I look back on confessions with him, I wonder what he was doing with his other hand while holding the penitent fast with the grappling hook.   It’s hard for me not to believe that he was homosexual with a taste for pubescent boys.  He was also though the easiest path to God’s forgiveness of our besetting mortal sins of impurity.  If my suspicions about him are correct, I suspect there were some boys in St. Leo Parish who were victims of his sexual abuse.  Of course, I hope my suspicions are wrong.

The most popular priest was a young fellow named Father Burke.  He was friendly and open without any hint of being manipulative or predatory.  I remember only two things about him.  One, that I liked him.  Two, that he was delegated to come into our 7th and 8th classes before summer vacation to give us the temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-avoidance-of-occasions-of-sin talks.  In large part because the American Catholic Church was so thoroughly an Irish Catholic entity, the avoidance of ‘the solitary vice,’ of ‘self-abuse,’ of anything having to do with s-e-x was about as important as defeating Godless Communism and keeping the “undesirables” out of our neighborhoods.  Father Burke told us boys (the girls of course were in another classroom waiting to get their temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-never-BE-an-occasion-of-sin-for-a-boy talk) that staying in a bathtub or shower any longer than was necessary to remove the dirt from our bodies was inviting damnation.  Better a soiled body than a sullied soul.  

Growing up Irish American Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago was a schizophrenic experience.  While we received occasional infusions of “God so loved the world . . .” the main teaching of the Church, which is to say the professional God-guys, was fear of eternal damnation.  The Church touted the Little Flower and St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds when it needed a little romanticism and sentimentalism, but its regular indoctrination came right from the same Calvinistic hellhole that Jonathan Edwards drew from when he wrote his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon.  The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. There was precious little difference between 16th and 17th century Puritan moral theology and the Irish Catholic moral theology of the mid-20th century.  Damn near every sin more grievous than disobeying your mother was a mortal sin and if you died with one mortal sin on your soul, the eternal fires of Hell awaited you.  Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?  Imagine holding a lighted match under your finger for one second.  For ten seconds.  For ten minutes!  Ten hours!! TEN THOUSAND MILLION GAZILLION YEARS!!!!!   And that’s not one one trillionth of one one trillionth of ETERNITY!    And, to make growing up more interesting, any boy or girl could get into this kind of trouble as soon as they reach “the age of reason” which the God-guys decided was 7 years old.  This teaching was enough to keep a pubescent boy awake at night praying for no wet dreams, especially before he fell asleep.

At least if one did slip into a sin of the flesh meriting burning in Hell for all eternity, the sin could be forgiven by coming alongside Father Devereaux and being grappled. 

So, even though The Scarlet Letter is set 'in a galaxy far far away,' Puritan Massachusetts hundreds of years ago, it's pretty easy for a Catholic raised in the 1940 and 1950s, before the Second Vatican Council, to relate to what happends in it. 

As part of my campaign to take care of 'little shit' that I've been putting off too long, I deposited the checks from Costco and the state income tax refund at the bank this afternoon, along with stashing the endless supplied of medications, lotions, creams, and ointments I have collected from the VA.  Also refilled my two weekly pill boses, did some laundry, tried to figure out how to access our streaming services on my new TV, sat on the patio for awhile admiring all the extraordinary ordinary beauty around me. . . . . . I stuffed two ancient Apple laptops into a carrying casse to return to the Apple Store for recycling.  That's the easy part.  The hard part will be getting them to the Apple store.  They weigh a ton (for me) so I have to plan on getting to the store early on a weekday morning when I can find a parking space near the store. . . .  I moved my 'death dossier' back out to the dining room table to go through it with Geri and see what else should be obtained and/or included.  We've put it off too long, especially since the last few days I've felt like I've been at aux portes de la mort.