0808

August 8, 2022 

Down at 10ish, up at 6, 5 pss, 1 glass of red wine before bed, and woke up tired.  The air is heavy with humidity, and windows are a bit fogged up.  We thought we might get a deluge last night, but the rain gauge indicated somewhere between 1/2 inch and 3/4 inch.  

    Geri was on the phone at 7 last night with Katherine and Steven, for about 40 minutes.  Steve will be flying out here on 8/30 or 8/31 to accompany Jim on his flight out to Alexandria.  It will be Steve rather than Geri in case Jim has any problem(s) with his catheter.  I will ask Geri today what I didn't think to ask her last night, i.e., whether she would like to also accompany Jim.  I can't anticipate the answer to that question.  I woke up this morning thinking about Jim and about his moving away and feeling sad, a sense of loss.  I seem to be prone to advance grieving, had it with Kitty, now feeling it about Lilly and now about Jim.  Geri says he is happy to be moving and I surely hope she is correct, but a major move across the country is stressful even for those in their prime and I have to believe it's the same for those "in the sere and yellow."  In any case, Jim has been a friend for the better part of 4 years now, a part of our lives as well as a member of our family,  and despite the irritations and frustrations triggered by his memory loss and hearing loss and increasing confusion and inability to tend to the simplest affairs of daily living,   I feel sad about his departure and about his near-total loss of agency, autonomy.

    I spoke with Geri yesterday about my new, VA-provided medical alert device, wondering what 'callee(s)' I should designate for emergency calls.  She suggested the North Shore Fire Department and I think she's right.  I'm going to call them and ask for their advice.

    I looked up on YouTube how to mix and apply an acrylic glaze, thinking it might help with the workup of Munch's Madonna.  I had some acrylic glazing liquid downstairs and tried it and was pretty happy with the results although it's clear I have a lot to learn.  I'll try to do something with the workup of Modigliani's Woman with Black Tie.

    I asked Geri if she might like to accompany Steve and Jim on the flight to Alexandria and she said she would just be in the way.  Probably right, as usual.  She says she'll go out there at some time after he is settled in.

    This year's annual FB posting re Hiroshima/Nagasaki:

    "Old age blurs or destroys so many of our memories but some stay vivid well into our last years.  On this eve of the anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki following the bombing of Hiroshima, I always remember the short train ride I took from Iwakuni, Japan, to Hiroshima in the summer of 1965, 20 years following that city's obliteration by our atom bomb.  Hiroshima is only 30 miles from Iwakuni so I suspect its residents in 1945 heard the bomb blast, perhaps saw the top of the mushroom cloud, and probably played host to the cesium-137, strontium-90, iodine-131, the appropriately named Americium-241, and other radioactive particles in the bomb's fallout. 

      I have two especially vivid memories of that visit to Ground Zero.  First, when I came out of the Hiroshima train station, I was struck by how new and modern the city was.  It took me a second to remind myself that of course every building I was seeing had been built within the preceding 20 years.  I still feel some embarrassment over that initial reaction.  Second, I remember many Japanese children at the Peace Memorial staring at me as if I were a freak.   I did not see other Americans or Westerners while I was there and it was not unlikely that, for those children if not for their parents, I and my companions were the first Americans they had seen.   We were not only Americans but Marines with 'whitewall haircuts' and we could hardly have looked more different from the Japanese men the children were accustomed to.  I felt as freakish as I looked to those children.  The Peace Memorial had many photographs and other artifacts showing the effects of the bomb on the people and the city of Hiroshima.  It is a very real horror show.  My father had been one of the 70,000 Marines who fought on Iwo Jima to defeat the Japanese Empire and, according to some theories at least, had been spared the probable next campaign (after Okinawa) of invading Japan's home islands. only by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  So I felt rather more connected to Hiroshima, its people and war history, and its bombing than others might feel.  Remembering those children now reminds me of all the children who died or were mutilated in that war, and of all the children who died or were mutilated in Vietnam where I was headed in 1965, and all the children in Iraq and Afghanistan, in so many other places and now in Ukraine who have been killed or mutilated in modern warfare.  The memories are still fresh,  but to express the thoughts they trigger, words fail me."