710/2026

 Friday, July 10, 2026

1917 Emma Goldman was imprisoned for obstructing the draft

1971 National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) was founded by women Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Myrlie Evers-Williams, Gloria Steinem, et al.

2025 Israeli airstrikes killed at least 15 Palestinians, including eight children and two women, queuing for nutritional supplements near a medical point in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. They were among at least 82 killed in strikes in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that it struck a member of Hamas's elite Nukhba forces who took part in the October 7 attacks.

In bed at 9:10, up at 4:35; 0555  203.2. 133/71/60  118; 63/75/63, sunny early, cloudy afternoon.

Morning meds at a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and  p.m.

Tom Lake.  I finished the novel yesterday afternoon.  I try - unsuccessfully - to remember why I chose this particular novel, of all of Ann Patchell's novels, to get introduced to her writing.  It's an interesting story, but not my cup of tea.

One aspect of the novel that I enjoyed very much is that it is semi-structured around Thonton Wilder's great play Our Town, which I've referred to at least a few times in entries in this journal, specifically Emily Webb's return to life in her mother's kitchen and her bitter disappointment that we human beings fail to appreciate life as we live it.   

But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life, and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.

But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking. And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.

I've long loved Our Town and Emily's soliloquy,  so it was easy to relate to its incorporation into this novel.  I had a hard time, on the other hand, relating to Lara's relationship with Duke at Tom Lake, and especially with her visit with him in the asylum/rehab facility outside Boston, and their sneaky bathroom sex there.  Their steamy relationship at the summer stock theater can be chalked up simply to youth, hormones, newfound freedom, and naughtiness, but why, after he betrayed and dumped her so unceremoniously, did she go to Boston at his call and into the bathroom?  It's a sign of my opaqueness, and I suppose of Lara's opaqueness, that I can't understand why she went into the bathroom and took off her tights.  I suppose the trip to Boston and the bathroom sex were characteristic of the relationship between Lara and Duke from the beginning.  He was using her, and she was using him, like the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams:

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I've traveled the world and the seven seas
Everybody's lookin' for something

Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused

 

When Duke called her in New York and asked her to travel up to Boston to visit him, "I told him yes, because yes was the only word I had for Duke.  Yes was the only word I knew."  And I, an old man, wonder "Why?"  And wonder about the mysteries of male-female relationships.  And wonder again about "free will" and determinism. 

I was surprised by Lara's attitudes about sexual morality and about abortion.  We know she was born in the early 1960s, a full generation (and more, really) after my pre-WWII generation, and she doesn't appear to have any religious formation in her background, but I was nonetheless surprised that she slept with Duke the day she met him, and indeed 'shacked up' with him immediately at Tom Lake.  And, even after he so callously moved on from her to Pallace once she was replaced as the lead actress in Our Town, she nonetheless bussed up to Boston to see him and be fucked by him, on demand, in the hospital, "because yes was the only word I had for Duke."  Pride, self-respect, agency?  Ann Patchett was raised, and perhaps still is, Catholic.  She has said that her writing and attitudes are deeply influenced by Catholic values, although her novels are not overtly religious.   In any case, for this old, pre-60s, cradle Catholic, Lara's sexual looseness with Duke was hard to relate to, and even more difficult was the ease with which she had their fetus aborted after Boston: 

I'm here to tell you, I felt nothing but grateful.  There was always going to be a part of the story I didn't tell Joe or the girls.  What I did was mine alone to do.  I tore the page from the calendar and threw it away.

The act is not hard to understand, but the emotional easiness about it that she claims is. 

An interesting subtext of the story is that parents lie to their children, or at least withhold the truth from them.  Lara wasn't about to reveal to her husband or her daughters the truth about her great sex with Duke, about her trip to Boston and the bathroom tryst, or her pregnancy and abortion thereafter.  I'm reminded of Maggie Smith's great poem, Good Bones:

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

I sent this poem to my sister Kitty a few years before her death.  She told me she thought it was terribly depressing, and I replied that I thought it was hopeful, with the conclusion that

 This place could be beautiful,

right?  You could make this place beautiful. 

The belief that, although the world is "a real shithole," we can make it beautiful, that so much depends on our attitude and how we react to and interact with the shithole.  Isn't there much truth in that thought?  I don't know that I persuaded Kitty, or even that I've persuaded myself, but I hope so.

Should I read another Ann Patchett novel, or perhaps some of her essays?  I can't remember why, out of her 10 novels, I picked Tom Lake to read.   There must have been some reason. (Here I am again; free will v. determinism!). If I were to read another of her novels, it would be The Dutch House because of its focus on the close relationship of a sister and brother who grew up in challenging circumstances.

 

7/9/2026

 Thursday, July 9, 2026

1956 Dick Clark's first appearance as host of American Bandstand

1978, the American Nazi Party held a rally at Marquette Park, Chicago

1980 Seven people died in a stampede to see Pope John Paul II in Brazil

1987 Colonel Oliver North, USMC, admitted to shredding Iran-Contra evidence

2021 June 2021 was declared the hottest June ever recorded in the US in 127 years, with an average temperature of 72.6 degrees F (4.2 degrees above average

6:30 a.m. Bambi, a regular visitor recently in our backyard.  We never see his mother, only him.  He's resting, chewing his cud, and vulnerable, waiting for his mother, I suspect.

7:45 a.m. On the other side of the house, two tom turkeys feast on seeds spread on the ground under the bird feeders

In bed at 10, up at 5:40; 0555 202.0 133/78/60  126; 67/79/66 cloudy

Morning meds at a.m., and Eliquis at 6:40 a.m. and p.m.

Three years ago today, I wondered: Cur scribo?  I often wonder.  Is this just some form of narcissism?  Is it just to have something to do while idling on my recliner?  Am I just using this exercise as a daily check on cognitive decline, a clue for creeping dementia?  Is it because I have so few interactions with other human beings, and so few friends that I have regular contact with?  Just a silent way of blowing off steam over the sorry state of the world and the U.S.'s deep polarization?  Am I trying to leave a record of having been alive the last days of my life, expecting that I could kick the bucket anytime now?  Is it, as I have long thought, just a very inadequate substitute for my daily morning chats with my beloved sister with whom I shared a relationship like no other?  Or is it what I suggested in an earlier journal entry, just the need to write, as in 'fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, a writer gotta write'?  There was a fairly long period after my grandmother died in 1995 when I reestablished (or first established) communication with my father and I sent him a handwritten letter every day.  Trying to make up for lost time?  Or just trying to give him something to look forward to, because I knew he enjoyed receiving those letters?  And I enjoyed writing them, just as I enjoyed sending long, thoughtful text messages to Kitty all those mornings, for 5 or 6 years.  I kept sending her those morning messages well after she was no longer able to write back when she was in her last days, and even for a week or more after she died.  I didn't want to stop even though I knew she was not with me anymore.  A form of denial perhaps, but I knew she was gone and had been pre-grieving her loss long before she finally died.  Fish gotta swim.       

 

Mousicide.  We have had two mouse sightings in our house this summer, both by me, one in the basement workroom and one in my bedroom.  Geri called our professional rodent-fighter to the house, and he did whatever it is he does, checking for access points, etc.. Still, Geri opened the door to the basement yesterday and uttered a little shriek when she saw the mouse brazenly perched on a basement stair, looking at her.  When I heard that outcry, I knew I couldn't avoid it: I had to set mousetraps to kill the little guy.  Except for insects and rats, I hate killing animals, including house and field mice and chipmunks.  I know it's necessary for health and property protection reasons, or to protect the plants in Geri's garden that she works so diligently to nurture; I just hate to do it.  

To a Mouse

By Robert Burns

On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

          Wi’ bickerin brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee

          Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

          Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

          An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen-icker in a thrave

          ’S a sma’ request:

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

          An’ never miss ’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

          O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

          Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

An’ weary Winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

          Thou thought to dwell,

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

          Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

          But house or hald,

To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,

          An’ cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

          Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

          On prospects drear!

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,

          I guess an’ fear!

Jimmy Aquavia, in my thoughts every day

7/8/2026

 Wednesday, July 8, 2026

1741 Theologian Jonathan Edwards preached perhaps the most famous of all American sermons, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," at Enfield, Connecticut, part of the Great Awakening

1969 US troop withdrawal began in Vietnam

2021  President Joe Biden said US troops would withdraw from Afghanistan by August 31, despite increased Taliban gains across the country

2025 The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Taliban leaders over alleged persecution of girls, women, and the LGBTQ+ community

In bed at 10:15, up qt 5:45; 0555 201.4  132.78/62 118; 68/86/66, sunny

Morning meds at 7:25 a.m., and Eliquis at 6:50 a.m. and 6:50 p.m.  I skipped my evening dose of Eliquis again last night.  My alarm must not have sounded.  

Is the Vance/Trump 60-day ceasefire "deal" between the US and Iran over?  We're shooting at each other again, trying to kill each other's soldiers and destroy each other's stuff.  Trump says, "To me, I think it's over."  Was there anyone in the world, other than J. D. Vance, who ever thought that the signed "deal" was really a "deal"?

My Facebook post this morning:

I often grieve that I have become so cynical and pessimistic in my old age.  Then I remember stuff like this:

Opioid of the Masses  

J. D. Vance

July 4, 2016, The Atlantic magazine

A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood. After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards.

That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin. A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: “It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.” He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day.

Folks back home speak of heroin like an apocalyptic invader, something that assailed the town mysteriously and without warning. Yet the truth is that heroin crept slowly into Middletown’s families and communities—not by invasion but by invitation.

Very few Americans are strangers to addiction. Shortly before I graduated from law school, I learned that my own mother lay comatose in a hospital, the consequence of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet heroin was only her latest drug of choice. Prescription opioids—“hillbilly heroin” some call it, to highlight its special appeal among white working-class folks like us—had already landed Mom in the hospital and cost our family dearly in the decade before her first taste of actual heroin. And before her own father gave up the bottle in middle age, he was a notoriously violent drunk. In our community, there has long been a large appetite to dull the pain; heroin is just the newest vehicle.

Of course, the pain itself has increased in recent years, and it comes from many places. Some of it is economic, as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist. Some of it is aesthetic, as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and vibrant gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders. Some of it is domestic, as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs. Some of it is political, as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interests even less, sputters along. And some of it is cultural, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation’s children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead.

During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.

Last Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, I met a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War at a local coffee shop. “I was lucky,” he told me. “At least I came home. A lot of my buddies didn’t. The thing is, the media still talks about us like we lost that war! I like to think my dead friends accomplished something.” Imagine, for that man, the vengeful joy of a Trump rally. That brief feeling of power, of defiance, of sending a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen. Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades.

In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic.

Yet a common thread among Trump’s faithful, even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities. These are places where good jobs are impossible to come by. Where people have lost their faith and abandoned the churches of their parents and grandparents. Where the death rates of poor white people go up even as the death rates of all other groups go down. Where too many young people spend their days stoned instead of working and learning.

Many years ago, our neighbor (and my grandma’s old friend) in Middletown moved out and rented his house on a Section 8 voucher—a federal program that offers housing subsidies to low-income people. One of the first folks to move in called her landlord to report a leaky roof. By the time the landlord arrived, he discovered the woman naked on her couch. After calling him, she had started the water for a bath, gotten high, and passed out. Forget about the original leak, now much of the upstairs—including her and her children’s possessions—was completely destroyed. Not every Trump voter lives like this woman, but nearly every Trump voter knows someone who does.

Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes.

What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.

I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.

Rahm Emanuel speaks truth to power in Tel Aviv.  From this morning's NYTimes:

Unconditional U.S. support of Israel should end . . . 

Above all, he says, Israel will need to allow again for the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty and give up on dreams of annexing all of the West Bank.

A New York Times/Siena poll this spring found that 60 percent of Democratic supporters said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis; only 15 percent were more supportive of Israel.

Like a growing number of Democrats — and like Mr. Netanyahu himself, of late — Mr. Emanuel calls for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, saying bluntly that Israel is wealthy enough to buy weapons like any other ally. He says that he would use sanctions, much as former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did, to fight both construction of illegal settlements and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Whether Israelis will heed him is uncertain, but Mr. Emanuel brings considerable credibility as a longstanding supporter of the country. His father was born in Jerusalem and fought in Israel’s war for independence. He was an adviser to Mr. Clinton during the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 and, informally, during the Camp David peace talks in 2000. 

 “Your government is complicit in the horrors now being inflicted on innocent families in the West Bank,” he says. “That undermines your international legitimacy at a time when you can least afford it.”

Adding that “we’ve done you no favors by averting our eyes from your misjudgments,” Mr. Emanuel says that he would impose sanctions on Israeli individuals who attack Palestinians or their property, and on Israeli officials who support such violence. Perhaps more significantly, he would impose them on construction companies or banks involved in illegal settlement construction.

He partly blames U.S. policymakers over the years who believed “that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government.”

That, he says, produced a prime minister who could count on paying little price “if he ignored America’s concerns about settlements and sparked a regional war.” It allowed Israel to deny food and medical relief to suffering Gazans, “leaving the world to conclude that Israelis not only want to kill” them but are “indifferent to their death, destruction and suffering.” And it emboldened a governing coalition that learned that it could burn West Bank farmland and “terrorize Palestinian families without consequence.”

I have long believed that the people of Israel headed took a tragic wrong turn in 1977 with the landslide victory of the Likud Party, founded by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon.  That was when the people of Israel, at least the majority of them, turned away from their Labor Party, socialist, kibbutznik roots and toward hardline right-wing government, completing the evolution when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, to be eventually succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu.  I suspect that for many Israelis, and many non-Israeli Jews, the State of Israel has become a Baal, a false god.  I think, though I'm not sure of my memory on this, that Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned against this in at least one of his prescient writings.  He also wisely warned against the long-term occupation and annexation of the territories conquered in the Six-Day War.  How right he was.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.  I started this novel yesterday and am halfway through it this afternoon. It's a story within a story, narrated in the first person by Lara Nelson, in her late 50s, to her three daughters, all in their 20s.  The interior story recounts Lara's youthful romance with the famous actor Peter Duke.  The principal characters in this first half of the novel are all likeable and engaging, but until very recently, I was wondering what Patchett's point was in writing the novel because it had no real point of tension, stress, or conflict. The plot is thickening considerably at the novel's midpoint with the revelation that Peter Duke had some serious mental or emotional problems, and the revelation that Emily, Lara's oldest daughter, who is about to marry, refuses to bear any children.  Most of the dialogue between Lara and her daughters occurs on the family's cherry farm in northern Michigan while they are all engaged in harvesting sweet cherries.  It all occurs during the COVID-19 pandemic.  I expect the second half of the story to be more engaging than the first half.

 

7/7/2026

 Tuesday, July 7, 2026

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:40; 0555 140/77/62 129 202.6,  0605 132/74/62;  59/80/57, sunny day ahead

Morning meds at 6:50 a.m., and Eliquis at 6:40 a.m and p.m.

One year ago today, I wrote: 

I like books.  I can no longer read them, but I like them.  I used to enjoy reading them, and even if I didn't care to read a particular book, I appreciated that it was a book.  I appreciated that an author went to the considerable trouble to write it and that someone thought enough of it to publish and distribute it.  I like new books and I like used books.  I have mixed feelings about marking up books - underlining, highlighting, marginalia, etc, but I even like used books that a prior owner has marked up.  A book that has been marked up is a book the reader thought about as she read it, a book she probably intended to keep and not to resell.  It is a book the reader thought she would or might return to with her markups as guideposts to passages of some significance.   I even like it when a prior owner has inscribed her name on the book, and sometimes the year of acquisition.  It suggests the importance of ownership: "This is MY book."  I generally prefer hardbound books to paperbacks, which seem too disposable.  I especially prefer leatherbound books and books in slipcases.  Their bindings and protective cases proclaim, "This is an important book."  Leatherbound books also have heft, which I appreciate - not too much heft, like my leatherbound War and Peace, but enough to signify permanence and importance.  I am also a sucker for collections of books, even ones that were traditional inducements to join the Book-of-the-Month Club.  like Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization.  I managed to hold off on acquiring that magnum opus but did acquire from other sources the works of Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Elie Wiesel, and Saul Bellow.

I have a good number of leatherbound and slipcased books that I have acquired over many decades.  Many of them I have read; many I have not read.  Some I have gone into more than once, mostly collections of poetry, but also The Great Gatsby, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Crime and Punishment, and even The Iliad ("rosey-fingered dawn"). 

I think about books this morning because I opened my laptop to a page on Ebay with THE COLLECTED TALES OF A. E. COPPARD, offered for $19.95 plus $4.95 shipping.    

I sometimes wonder what will become of my books (paintings journal, memoir)  once I am dead.

I stopped writing this, intending to return to it, when I left the house the VA Urology Clinic and Mental Health Clinic ("subdued mood").  I'm told I need surgery on my penis.  If I wasn't depressed when I left, I am now.   

I feel a bit foolish as I reread these words a year later, because (1) since my last cataract surgery, I've been on a book-reading binge, and (2) I've had the surgery on my penis, an ill-named 'meatontomy', and it was no big deal, no pun intended.  I hadn't dreaded it as much as I dreaded the catheter ablation of my heart, but I was no Braveheart for either operation.

Since CBG got me reading Theo of Golden in the middle of February, I've read The Last Sweet Mile also by Allen Levi; The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Erhlich; The Idiot and Notes From Undeground by Dostoevski; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; The Correspondent by Virginia Evans; 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff; And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and My Friends by Fredrik Backman; The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret; Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott; The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Things We Never Say, My Name if Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh, William, and Lucy By The Sea by Elizabeth Strout; Stoner by John Williams; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Lonsesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.  I have Robert Sapolsky's Determined on the floor next to my recliner.  I don't expect to read the whole work, but only enough of it to give me a better grasp of this argument and the evidence he offers in support of it.

The point is simply that last year's journal entry on this date shows how very little I know even of myself, much less of anything or anyone else.    

The Secret of Elizabeth Strout’s Appeal: How she writes best sellers that are also critical darlings by Ed Begley in the Books section of the current The Atlantic magazine.

    How does she do it? Not just the neat trick of beguiling highbrow critics while at the same time pleasing millions of readers who don’t care about literary bona fides. The real feat is harpooning the reader artlessly (or so it seems), with language as plain as a Congregational church, a paucity of dramatic incident, and a cast of characters no more exotic than your neighbors. They aren’t exotic, her characters, but they’re quirky—some cantankerous, some bafflingly passive, all convincingly real. Thinking about them, I keep coming back to the bedrock of her work, what she has called “the singularity and mystery of each person.” She shows us how strange we are, and how similar (an insight verging on homily but thankfully sugar-free). She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of.

Mary Gordon, When Death Comes, 

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular, . . . 

How hard it is to stay aware of "the singularity and mystery of each person."  I believe in it; I know intellectually that each of us is unique.  I know that each of us has his own history, her own story, their own anomalous salience.  I've become more aware of our commonness and our singularity since becoming a regular at the VA Medical Center here in Milwaukee, but also just from shopping at Walmart, Costco, Sendik's, and MetroMarket.   In my old age, I am more aware of the people around me in the aisles, the checkout lines, and in the parking lot.  More aware that each one has or had particular parents that had particular effects on their characters and personalities, had particular teachers and other influencers in their lives, had particular religious and political influences in their lives (or not).  I'm not sure why, but this awareness of our singularity, that each of us is shaped by unique forces in our lives, different from the forces in other folks' lives, inclines me to agree with Sapolsky's position that "free will" is a myth, that every choice or decision we make in our lives flows inexorably from all the combined forces at work on us the moment that we think we are making a choice, a free decision.       

“You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”

“Thus, essentially every aspect of your childhood—good, bad, or in between—factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have”

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe. 

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

Sapolsky has also written: "We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath."  In some sense, the theory of determinism seems to undercut my previous assertion that I believe in the uniqueness and singularity of each of us,  Each of us comes into existence uniquely and is exposed to many unique influences as well as many common influences.  How we emerge and evolve is unique to each of us, and "free will" would seem to have nothing to do with who we are.

Patio time.  It's a beautiful day, and I spent some time sitting on the patio enjoying the view and listening to the birds, along with Merlin, who identified goldfinches, sparrows, cardinals, doves, house finches, robins, chickadees, and a red-winged blackbird.  From inside the house, I watch the birds.  On the patio, I listen.

Two years ago on this date I wrote:

Should I continue?  At the end of this month, I will have made entries in this journal every day for two years, except for the weeks I was laid low by polymyalgia rheumatica, a period from April 22nd until May 13th.  At the beginning of that span, I wrote "Is the journaling coming to an end?  Losing interest, losing energy, losing focus.  There is a broader significance to these losses."  The broader significance then was my nightly thoughts of suicide, a repeat of my experiences years ago with severe pain from Hunner's ulcers.  Now the ulcers are taken care of, at least for now, and the PMR is taken care of, at least for now, but I have that challenge of losing interest, losing energy, and losing focus, finding it hard to think of what to write about.  Or I think of topics, like the challenge of trying the Christian ethic and the impossibility of living it, or the moral challenge of living in the world we live in, with an economy based on the production and sale of billions of consumer goods filling merchants' shelves all over the 'developed' world, billions devoted to military budgets and the production and deployment of ever more lethal weapons with which to kill one another, the demands of climate change, etc.  How much do I sin taking a drive in the country?  using hot water rather than the cold water out of the tap for kitchen clean-up, keeping the thermostat up in the winter and down in the summer, maintaining a large lawn requiring mowing, fertilizing, and herbicides on .62 of an acre, and on and on.  Limousine Liberal, virtue signaling, phony baloney, hypocrite.

My writing has become like Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's speech: discursive, incoherent, meandering, and, as David Branch always reminded me, prolix.  Now I have Grammerly for Safari pointing out to me how wordy my writing is.  

Am I writing in this journal just to fill time, because I am otherwise so inactive?  Especially when I am up in the middle of every night?  Am I talking to myself?

My brother-in-law and friend, Jimmy Aquavia, received the Last Sacraments yesterday.  He turned 92 last month. He has suffered from Alzheimer's Disease for many years and lost his wife, Nancy in February, 2018.  He lived down the road from us from 2019 until Labor Day, 2022, when he moved to Alexandria, VA, to be near his daughter Katherine, his firstborn and only daughter and holder of his powers of attorney.  When Nancy was struggling through her final illness at home, Geri drove down to eastern Tennessee to be with Jimmy, Katherine, and the sons.  As another act of sisterly love, she composed an elegant letter to Jimmy encouraging him to move up here to the Milwaukee area to be near her.  He lived in the Newcastle senior living complex in Mequon for almost 4 years, with Geri visiting him, taking him to all his doctor appointments, and otherwise caring for his many needs that required her personal attention.  He dined with us every Sunday and on holidays, and we watched all University of Kansas basketball games together.  He was my friend as well as my brother-in-law.  Two old men sharing memories, reflections, fears, frustrations, commiserations, and chronic hearing, memory, and bladder problems.  I was saddened to learn that Jimmy is on his way out, though with the mixed emotions that inevitably accompany the death of one whose long life has become more of a curse than a blessing.   I hope his passing will be peaceful.  I am thankful that in his last days and years, he was blessed with the care of his sister and then of Katherine and her wonderful husband, Jordan.

7/6/2026

Monday, July 6, 2026

1942 Anne Frank's family went into hiding in the Annex, Amsterdam

1947 Spain voted for Francisco Franco as Head of State for life until death 

 

In bed at 9, up at 4:35; 0450 140/76/58 98 202.6, 0505 140/78/58; 63/74/62, sunny day.

Morning meds at 10 a.m., and Eliquis at 7 a.m. and p.m.

Buckeye.  I finished the novel early this morning, mostly at the VA waiting for my 8 a.m. appointment for lymphedema.  I was deeply touched, moved by the novel, perhaps because of my inescapable self-referentiality.  The closing chapters of the novel are set during the Vietnam War, and Skip, Cal and Becky's son, is a Marine killed during the Battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968.  Cal, Becky, and Felix finally tell Tom is his history, including Felix's sexuality, Margaret's and Cal's affair, and Cal's paternity.  Tom goes through a long period of estrangement both from Felix and from Cal & Becky.   Margaret returns - late - for Felix's funeral and experiences a brief reconnection with Tom.  There are several tremendously powerful emotional scenes.  Some quotes:

“This is why old people seem distant and distracted, [Felix] thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us.”

“The wisdom that comes with age was needling, [Cal] found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.” 

“Over and over, [Becky] learned that what the dead most often conveyed was love and forgiveness. She could only conclude that these were the two most important things in the world—so important that people carried them into the afterlife for the sole purpose of being able to hand them back to the living.”

“What was becoming clearer, however—and had probably always been clear to her mother—was that she [Margaret] was looking for understanding where there was none to be found. She was looking for understanding in an act of wanton selfishness. Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.” 

Yesterday I wrote that I was considering closing the covers on this novel and moving on because of the implausibility of Becky communicating with the dead, or of the dead communicating with her or anyone.  It's another way of doubting that there is any life after death, that there's a soul or spirit that survives after a corporeal body dies.  I say "implausibility" because no one knows whether there is any life after death.  Millions say they believe there is,  millions deny it, and no one knows, including me.  Are Becky's beliefs and behaviors plausible novelistic devices to make points and move a plot along?  The success of Buckeye says 'yes.'  Author Ryan's point, I suppose, is that love and forgiveness are the most important things in life, and his entire story about his principal characters supports this. 

None of the four characters is a hero, and none is a villain.  Each has strengths, and each has flaws.  Each is a believable, complex human being.  Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.  To understand all is to forgive all.  Cal committed double adultery with Margaret, but only when Becky had rejected him for ousting the shifty promoter Casey LaGrange.  Margaret had the passionate affair with Cal only after years of sexless marriage to the secretly gay Felix, and lonely separation from Felix's for years during the war.  Felix had his affair with Augie Varick only after years of profound sexual frustration.  He also hid his homosexuality from Margaret.  All of the principals contributed in some material way to the liaison that resulted in Cal's fathering Thomas Aquinas Salt.  All contributed to keeping Cal's paternity a secret from Tom, and all (except Margaret) contributed to finally telling him the painful truth at age 24.

The novel makes me wonder again about free will and determinism.  Sapolsky argues that every action is brought about by all of the conditions - biological, genetic, environmental, historical, hormonal, emotional, etc. - that precede and accompany the action.  He posits that our choices in life are not only conditioned by all preceding conditions but are determined by them.  Was it inevitable, inexorable, unavoidable that Margaret and Cal would have their affair?  Was it foredoomed that Margaret would tell Felix of her affair with Cal and of Tom's biological father?  Sapolsky's case seems pretty strong to me.

It also makes me wonder about the role that Chance, Luck, Fortuitousness, or Happenstance plays in our lives.  Margaret just happened to be in front of Cal's hardware store when V-E Day was broadcast on the radio.  Why was it Skip's transport that ran over the landmine outside Hué.  What role did Chance play in Cal's being born with one leg 2 inches shorter than the other?  Emily Dickinson: In this short life that only lasts an hour / How much - how little - is within our power.

I was particularly struck by Buckeye's description of the experience of draft-eligible men, and of their parents, during the first massive draft lottery on December 1, 1969.  I was in my last year of law school at the time.  I was 28 years old, married and a father, and had already served 4 years of active duty and 2 years in the (inactive, but Ready) reserves.  My classmates were not so fortunate (if "fortunate" is the correct term). The nation was awash with anxiety.  In the novel, Skip had already joined the Marines and been killed almost two years before the lottery when his transport vehicle struck a land mine outside Hué in northern I Corps. 

[Cal and Becky] spent two years worrying about the draft.  Becky had sat down with two different mothers from Bonhomie whose sons had died in Ia Drang.  She had sat down with a father who had a son missing in action since mid-1966.  She told Cal that if Skip had got called up, she'd do her best to convince him to go to Canada. . . . . It hadn't occurred to them that he would enlist.

And at the Salt house on Lottery night:  

Tom came home.  The lottery was like some grim game show where nobody wanted the prize.  Every date on the calendar was assigned a corresponding number.  Those numbers were put into capsules, placed in a big jar, and drawn out one by one.  The first 195 numbers drawn indicated 195 dates, and, if you were eligible, and one of those dates was your birthday, you were called up.  Felix watched, sitting forward, elbows on his knees and hads clasped together supporting his chin,  Tom sat back on the sofa, his arms tucked around himself.   By chance, his number was in the 300s.  The relief they both felt was ardent, but subdued.

 These stories of Vietnam anxieties remind me of my sister relating to me the story of my mother opening the letter I sent from Japan, telling the family that I was on my way to Vietnam.  She broke down in tears as she read it, and I suspect she never drew an easy breath until she learned I was out of Vietnam and on Okinawa, and probably not until I was back in the States.  I'm reminded, too, of the parents for whom I was the dreaded casualty assistance calls officer delivering the news of their Marine son's death or wounding in 1966-67, and of the millions of parents who weren't visited by a CACO, but feared it every day and every night while their son was deployed.  The novel reminds me of the horrors of the Vietnam War not only for the Americans and others who fought it, and for the Vietnamese who endured it, but for all those parents, spouses,  siblings, children, and others with a loved one 'in country.'  

 

7/5/2026

 Sunday, July 5, 2026

1937, Spam was first introduced by the Hormel Foods Corporation

1948 The National Health Service was established in the UK

1950 The Law of Return was passed, guaranteeing all Jews the right to live in Israel

2017 101 people were reported shot, 15 killed in Chicago over the 4th of July weekend

2024  President Joe Biden gave an interview to quell fears about his stamina and cognitive abilities with ABC's George Stephanopoulos

In bed at 9:20, up at  5:35; 0550 134/81/63 118 202.8; 64/59/75/64 cloudy, rain in morning.

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m.,  and Eliquis at 6:45 a.m. and p.m.

Buckeye.  I started the day in the usual way, first taking care of the kitchen chores I had let go last night, then making coffee, then entering my 'vitals' in the VA record book, and then in this journal, then checking the NYTimes to be sure no calamity had occurred overnight, and then getting back to my book, which I had restarted while waiting to take my blood pressure.  The plot has thickened considerably.  Margaret and Cal have been involved in a passionate affair, with Felix aboard his ship in the Pacific and Becky no longer sleeping with Cal.  Then Felix's ship gets torpedoed and sunk in the Philippine Sea, Felix gets rescued, and sent first to a hospital in Manila, then another in San Francisco, where the following occurs:

Felix had no idea what was a reasonable amount of time to spend in the hospital after your ship got torpedoes out from under you, but it had been over two weeks since the Teague had gone done, and he was starting to get a little concerned about his diagnosis.  Were his discharge papers being delayed? Were they in limbo?

 "Understand," the doctor said, "it's our job to make sure our boys are in sound shape in every way before they reenter civilian life.  It's what we do."

Felix appreciated that, but he also knew that these doctors sometimes stamped NP on your record.  Neuropsychiatric.  He'd heard stories about that over the past three years.  An NP never went away, once it was in your file. . .  

 I read this and thought back to a rare conversation I had with my Dad, sitting at his kitchen table in North Port, FL, when, for the first and only time, he spoke to me a little about his time in the Marines, and his mustering out of the Marines at Great Lakes Naval Station in North Chicago.  He told me, "They didn't want to let me out."  He didn't mention any particulars, just that "they" didn't want to let him out, and that he pushed them.  I didn't probe for more information, perhaps out of respect for his privacy, but basically because I knew he was in bad shape when he was discharged.  I also knew that although he received an Honorable Discharge, he was discharged as a buck private, E1, the same rank he held on his first day as a Marine recruit in San Diego, one year and 9 months earlier.  He had clearly had disciplinary problems during his time of service, and psychological/emotional/mental problems after Iwo Jima.  But "they" did release him, and he came home to his 23-year-old wife, 4-year-old son, and 1-year-old daughter.  So far as I know, neither his wife nor his family ever received help from the government in dealing with their badly damaged veteran.

The story in Buckeye moved on from the very end of the war to the return of millions of young men to their families and civilian life, and on to the 1950s.  The main focus is on the Salts, Felix and Margaret, and the strains in their relationship, not only because of his homosexuality but also because of their three years of complete separation and his relationship with Augie on board the Teague.  The story is reminiscent of the great 1946 William Wyler movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, about three returning WWII vets played by Frederick March, Dana Andrews, and a real veteran who had lost both hands in the Navy, Harold Russell.  The novel and the movie remind me of - words fail me - the difficulties facing both my Dad and my Mom.  He got home the day after Thanksgiving.  How to account for that?  I wonder now, in light of all that I know (and all that I don't know), whether he returned to my mother or rather to his mother and father.  Such mysteries.   When, 20 years ago or so, I asked his sister, my Aunt Monica, for some information about his homecoming after the war, she became distraught, almost hysterical, upset that I was looking into that period of the family's life.  All she would tell me was how badly damaged he was when he got back to Chicago.  I still have a vivid memory of the phone call, where I was when I called, what I said, and how she reacted.  

I know what it was like coming back to the States, and to married life, after a year of separation.  I can hardly imagine what it might be like to return after 2 years or 3 years, or, in my Dad's case, 21 or 22 months wrapped around Iwo Jima.  The more I reflect on their experiences in their early 20s, the greater the sympathy and admiration I feel for my parents.

. . .  Back to the novel, I'm 2/3rds of the way through it this afternoon, and the Salts and the Jenkins families have become very intertwined. Skip Jenkins has become a regular playmate and protector of Thomas Aquinas Salt, and Felix has become a regular 'client' of Becky Jenkins' psychic service.  Through her, he has made contact with his Navy lover, Augie Varick.  I'm at the point of asking myself whether the gross implausibility of Becky's supposed ability to 'penetrate the membrane between the world of the living and the world of the dead' makes this whole story so implausible as to be not worth continuing.  Everything else in the novel is plausible, indeed quite realistic.  Cal, Felix, and Margaret are all believable, as are their parents and their children, but Becky . . . ?