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 Tuesday,November 22, 2022

OMG   I can't believe it.  I started to type 'November 22, 1963', the day the world fell apart.  Later.  In bed at 9:30, up a little before 5, thinking of my mother, the movie of The Five Sullivan Brothers, 'sole surviving son' regulations in the military/naval forces, my mother crying over the movie. Kennedy dead now for 59 years, a lifetime for many.  My mother dead for 49 years.   So many thoughts.  So very many thoughts.

What I think of when I feel guilty about spending money on art supplies and suchlike

GREEN BAY ‒ One — perhaps the only — benefit from the Green Bay Packers losing six of the last seven games is tickets becoming more affordable.  The average get-in price for two of the Packers' remaining six games are below $100 and all but one dropped in the last week after the Packers lost to the Tennessee Titans at Lambeau Field on Thursday. Prices are determined by averaging the lowest prices at 10 secondary market sites.  The average lowest price for the Packers game in Philadelphia on Sunday was $197 on Monday, down from $255 last week.

Veterans Administration

I sent an email to my primary care doctor, Kumkum Chattopadhyay, "Dr. Chatt," late last Friday.  This morning I got a call from her nurse, Kim Kitzke, informing me that Dr. Chatt wanted me to come in for an "Urgent Care" visit today or tomorrow.  Turns out Dr. Chatt has been on vacation but she checked her email, or Kim called her about it, and she had Kim call me.  I have been impressed with the medical care I have received from the VA from the moment I was enrolled in the system.  I've journaled before about the good feeling I have after each visit there because of the sense of connection with the other mostly old vets in varying stages of decrepitude and the simple acts of kindness, care, and helpfulness I often see while there.  I have the same feeling and judgment about the doctors, nurses, and therapists. ***** As if to prove my point, Nurse Kim just called.  The Urgent Care scheduler had arranged an appointment for me for tomorrow at 2:30.  Kim called to say she could get me in to see a Gold Clinic physician at 1:00 this afternoon.  All along the line, professionalism and care demonstrated, by Dr. Chatt ensuring I would come in today or tomorrow to see a doctor even though she is on vacation,  by the scheduler outside the Gold Clinic getting me an appointment tomorrow, by Kim following up and getting me an earlier appointment within the Gold Clinic today and taking a history of the pelvic pain I've been experiencing, my prior history with IC, chronic pelvic pain, Hunner's ulcers, etc.  Republicans keep warning us of the horrors of 'socialized medicine,' universal health care, and the like.  The VA is socialized medicine, provided by the federal government.  Dr. Chatt, Nurse Kim, and the scheduler are all federal employees, yet the service they provide to me and other vets is personal, professional, competent, and caring.  'nuf said.

    Back from the VA: I was seen by a young resident, Dr. Kenkel, and by his supervisor, Dr. Hayes.  By the time I saw Dr. Kenkel, I was in a lot of pain and had difficulty walking, paying attention to the questions he asked, and focusing on accurate answers to them.  When he stepped out to consult with Dr. Hayes, I went to the bathroom and emptied my bladder.  Voila! pain disappeared.  Suggests that my problem is bladder-related - again.  A referral was made to the urology clinic, so I'll wait for a call to schedule a visit.

 Mother

My mother was wonderful, a saint, a hero.  Incredibly strong, brave, and loyal to family and friends, even when my sister and I wished she would be disloyal to our father.  She was also 1st generation Irish, both parents Irish immigrants and sentimental.  I wrote of the Sullivan brothers above, and the 1944 movie The Fighting Sullivans.  The Sullivan boys all enlisted in the Navy together after Pearl Harbor and did so on the condition that they be assigned to the same duty station, in their case, a Navy cruiser, the USS Juneau.   The Juneau was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the battle of Guadalcanal and the Sullivan boys, and most of the other crewmen, all went down with their ship.  Thereafter, the War Department adopted the 'Sole Surviving Son' policy forbidding assigning all siblings to the same unit.  My mother had seen the movie once, it seems, but thereafter couldn't watch it.  Too hard on her, perhaps with memories of her husband and all of her brothers having served overseas during the war, and the submerged dread she must have felt every day during the war with so many loved ones in service.  In any case, I woke up this morning thinking of her, thinking of the Sullivan boys on the Juneau, and thinking of her relationship with their story, their fate.  Here is some of what I wrote about her in the memoir I wrote for my children:

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    "My mother’s early life reads like a melodrama.  Born of poor immigrant parents, she was motherless by age 5, left the only female in her family.  She was 7 years old when the market crashed in 1929 and a child and adolescent throughout the Great Depression.  Her father was almost certainly an alcoholic during her childhood and there were times (I know this from her) when the Salvation Army left baskets of food at the Healy doorstep.  She left high school before graduation to get a job either to support herself or to help with the expenses of the family, or more likely, both.  (It’s uncertain whether she lived with a couple of aunts for a time before she married.  My Aunt Monica says yes, my father thinks not.)   She became a bride at 18, a mother at 19, a victim of a brutal sexual assault at 25.  Her husband was drafted before she turned 22, leaving her with a 2½-year-old son and a daughter on the way.  For support she had $22 each month from my father’s $50 private’s pay and an $80 military dependents’ allotment from the government.  Her father was 64 years old and probably an out-of-control drinker by the time her husband was drafted and all three of her brothers were away in the services.  Her husband fought in the worst slaughterhouse battle in the Pacific theater, with Marine casualties so horrific that William Randolph Hearst wrote an editorial calling for a change of top command in the Pacific Theater of Operations and TIME magazine wrote about the furor over the editorial.  When the war ended and her husband came home, he was one of the thousands of hidden casualties with no missing limbs but with a hole inside him where his heart and soul had been and with a mind full of horrors that, like the Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima, crept out of hidden recesses to terrorize him.

    My mother suffered greatly in her too-short life.  She suffered from the absence of a mother, she suffered from an alcoholic father and alcoholic brothers, and, after the war, she suffered from an alcoholic husband with a terrible case of long-term PTSD.  She suffered from James Hartmann’s vicious attack on her in her own home.  These were in addition to the “ordinary” sufferings that life brings to each of us.  

    I would create an altogether inaccurate picture of your grandmother, however, if I were to paint her as some sort of long-suffering victim and martyr.  Of all of us in the family, it was she who was the strongest and the most life-loving, the least self-pitying and least blaming, the most aware of life as a blessing and a gift, the most religious and Catholic, and the most grateful for all that she had, especially her children.  She was the most loving and the most loyal, even to those who did not return the love or loyalty.  She was no whiner or sniveler.  She sang and she danced.  She laughed.  She liked people and people liked her. She was not naïve or Pollyannaish, but she was optimistic and hopeful.  She saw goodness and promise and dignity in people who were down and out after the Depression and the war, (including her husband, her father, and her oldest brother.)

Your grandmother was the biggest baseball fan in the house, listening to or watching White Sox games, cheering when they won and grousing when they lost.  She knew that Nellie Fox played 2nd base with a chaw of tobacco the size of a golf ball in his cheek and that Chico Carrasquel and then Luis Aparicio were terrific shortstops and not to be confused with Sammy Esposito who played 3rd base.  She loved to listen to the announcer introduce the lineup, especially when he chanted in long drawn out tones “and in left field, Orestes “Minnie” Minoso!”  She was excited when the Sox would play the Yankees and Billy Pierce would take on Whitey Ford in one of their many pitching duels.  She knew Billy Pierce was a better pitcher but she had a soft spot in her heart for Dick Donovan, who, after all, was Irish.  I don’t know whether she suggested to Uncle Jim that he take Kitty and me to Comiskey Park or whether he came up with the idea.  I don’t know who paid our streetcar fares or admissions to the ballpark.  It could have been either of them or they could have pooled their change.  In any case, they made me into a true blue White Sox fan, rooting for the team and my favorite player, right fielder Jim Rivera who would stand near the dugout gate and sign kids’ baseballs or scorecards before the game began.  I remember the excitement of getting off the Halsted Street streetcar at 35th Street and making our way on foot in the gathering crowd east to Shields Avenue and finding our way to the right field grandstand to be near Jim Rivera.  What I don’t remember is my mother, the No. 1 Sox fan, ever going to a ballgame herself.  She sent us and listened to the game on the radio or, later, watched it on television.  What I also have no memory of is my father getting excited about the Sox or the Cubs or about either of Chicago’s two NFL teams in those days, the Cardinals and the Bears.  Enthusiasm for life’s daily blessings came to us from Mom, never from Dad. 

     When I reached the age at which I was to attend my first dance, it was your grandmother who taught me to dance the two-step and the jitterbug while we listened to music on the radio, Elvis or Jimmy Rogers or the Four Lads.  I would practice the steps with Kitty or with our downstairs neighbor and friend Kathy Semrau before the dance.  There is a much larger sense, however, in which your grandmother taught me to dance, indeed to live.   I was reminded of her when I saw a bumper sticker that read: “Those who dance appear mad to those who don’t hear the music.”  Despite the lousy hand that was dealt to her as a girl and a young woman, Mary Healy heard the music.  That was part of her saintliness.  She refused to be a loser or a loner, a whiner or a sniveler, a victim or a mope.  That was her heroism.  She was as alive and spirited and as open to life as my poor father was the opposite, emotionally dead, dispirited, and trapped within his haunted self.  

. . . . . . .

    I want to close this terribly inadequate portrait of your grandmother by repeating my central point, that she was my first, best, and most lasting model of a saint and a hero in a world that I eventually came to see as full of saints and heroes and miracles.  Through strength of will and strength of character, she was a happy person despite all of the obstacles, all of the excuses for unhappiness.  If Kitty and I had not had her model for happiness in adversity, had we only had our father, our grandparents, my uncles and my aunt as models, I don’t know that we would have known any happiness in our lives or that we could have transmitted any sense of happiness to our own children.   It took effort, it took strength, it took heroism for my mother, not to feign happiness, but to be happy in spite of everything.  

She was also a circle-breaker.  Her father, her brothers, her husband, her in-laws, all were unhappy people for one reason or another.  It is easy enough to say that they ‘had every right to be unhappy’ and to wallow in the ‘slough of despond.’  But no one had any greater ‘right to be unhappy’ than my mother.  If she had chosen to live a life of self-pity, however, she would have transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, and to her husband, and to all around her.  Attitudehave s are contagious.  Your grandmother’s attitude was one of courage, of continued engagement with life, of not giving in to despondency.  She transmitted that attitude to Kitty and to me and although we have faltered along life’s road, it is her attitude that still sustains us.  It is her attitude that we have tried to transmit to you.  I hope you can from this wholly inadequate word portrait garner some idea of why your grandmother is, for your father and for your Aunt Kitty our patron saint, our guardian angel, and our hero. "

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Little wonder why I woke up this morning thinking of her almost half a century after she died.  And to be honest with myself I need to acknowledge that it is in remembering her I experience a great regret, that of not staying closer to her after I moved away from home in 1959 to go off to college and on into the Marines and law school and getting on with my life.  There were reasons for it but none of them excuses it.  It is her I think of when I read as I so often have, the stanzas of W.B. Yeats' Vacillation:

Although the summer Sunlight gild

Cloudy leafage of the sky,

Or wintry moonlight sink the field

In storm-scattered intricacy,

I cannot look thereon,

Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.