2/19/23

 Sunday, February 19, 2023

In bed at 10, awake at 4:30, up at 5, half-dreaming of monitoring a law school final exam with Madeleine Kelly of my students, the exam I drafted being a bad one, poorly drafted, grading exams at Beans Lake.  Also thinking of Kitty and Yahrzeit approaching,  Geri let Lilly out at 5:-05, and I let her in.  37℉ outside, high of 43 expected, wind SSW at 14 mph, range from 8 to 16 mph during the day, gusts up to 28 mph, wind chill is 28℉ now, 24 to 36 during the day. Sunrise at 6:43, sunset at 5:27, 10+55.

Unfinished entries from yesterday.   I never got back to my thoughts about my Dad 78 years ago on his troop ship the night before the amphibious assault, D-Day, on Iwo Jima.  I know he and the 70,000 other Marines and Navy hospital corpsmen were frightened, afraid they were about to die, thinking of their lives, their families and loved ones back in the States, thinking they might never see them again, or might see them again but missing an arm or a leg or terribly burned.  I wonder if they wondered whether they might survive but be emotionally and spiritually scarred, perhaps for the rest of their lives, as my father was.  They wrote what they knew might be their last letter home.  The Navy had massed 450 ships off of Iwo and bombarded the island with naval gunfire for 3 days before the landing. For 3 days, the assault troops heard intense gunfire from 5-inch guns on destroyers, 8-inch guns on cruisers, and 16-inch guns on battleships.  For days, the Marines cleaned their weapons and then cleaned them again.  They thought of the dangers inherent in climbing down heavy cargo nets, of safely releasing from the nets onto the deck of flat-bottomed LCVPs,  landing craft vehicle personnel, bobbing up and down as the ocean's waves hit the hull of the troop ship (a much more dangerous feat than anyone can appreciate if one hadn't experienced it.)  Standing in lines waiting their turn to mount the net, they checked their own and each other's 'gear', their backpacks, steel helmets, ammo belts, canteens, first aid kits, and of course rifles.  If any of their gear should become loose while descending the net and come crashing down on the LCVP below, Marines could be wounded before they even moved away from the ship and the Marine who lost the unsecured gear was in deep trouble already.  Once in the LCVP, packed "asshole to bellybutton," the Marines hoped they wouldn't throw up from the pitching and rolling and yawing of the boat in the never-ending waves, and if he did throw up, he hoped he would able to do it over the boat's gunnel or gunwale and not on the Marine packed in front of him.  He hoped he wouldn't shit or piss himself.  He hoped he wouldn't die; he hoped he wouldn't cry.  If he was to die or be wounded, he hoped it would be from a bullet and not from a mortar or artillery shell that would blow his body apart leaving him to be buried in pieces.  These are thoughts that I have every February 18th and 19th, remembering the battle of Iwo Jima and what it did to my father and many others.  I was 3 and 1/2 years old, my sister Kitty was almost 6 months old.  My mother was 2 months shy of her 23rd birthday; my Dad was 24.  We were all damaged by the battle.  We would all have very mixed emotions when seeing Joe Rosenthal's iconic photo of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi.  If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in,  / And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; / If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood /  Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, - / My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.

Also, the anniversary of Kitty's death on March 3 approaches.  I will light a Yahrzeit candle and mourn the loss of her.

LTMW It looks like every goldfinch in Bayside and Mequon is trying to perch on our niger feeder.  The disappointed ones temporarily shift to the sunflower seed feeder, which is now temporarily filled mostly with millet seed.  Many exquisite charcoal-colored snowbirds with their beautiful white bellies are busy on the ground joined by some goldfinches who couldn't elbow their way onto the niger tube.  It looks like a beautiful morning.  I suspect good neighbor John McGregor has already been out and back from his early morning walk.

Polish paczkis: Milwaukee's Ash Wednesday Sacramental.  Yesterday I went up to Sendik's to pick up some decaf coffee and some wine and what do I see when I walk through the doors but hundreds of paczkis, what we called Bismarks in Chicago but Poles call paczkis.  Loading up on paczkis before Ash Wednesday is an old Milwaukee tradition gifted to the city years ago by its large Polish community. Last year at this time, our home remodeling contractor Chris, a Polish immigrant, brought us a supply of homemade paczkis, a real treat.  I call the paczki a 'Polish sacramental' because it is so associated with Ash Wednesday and Fat Tuesday.  In Catholic theology, sacramentals like Holy Water and Ash Wednesday ashes and rosary beads are not to be confused with the 7 sacraments.  The sacraments confer grace of their own spiritual power ordained by the Most High. Sacramentals are just signs that tend to stimulate thoughts of the Most High.  They operate not directly because God so ordained, but rather through some intercession by the Church, some blessing.  Geri and I look forward to paczki season all year, recognize it as an essential component of the commencement of the Lenten season, so I feel free to consider paczkis sacramentals, right up there with holy water, ashes, palm fronds, scapular, and Miraculous Medals.  In fact, prune paczkis are probably my favorite sacramental (except for candles, a traditional Catholic favorite😊).

   

You Can’t Save Democracy in a Jewish State is Peter Beinart's oped in today's NYT.  "The principle that Mr. Netanyahu’s liberal Zionist critics say he threatens — a Jewish and democratic state — is in reality a contradiction. Democracy means government by the people. Jewish statehood means government by Jews. In a country where Jews comprise only half of the people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, the second imperative devours the first. . . In 2009, Palestinian Knesset member Ahmad Tibi quipped that Israel was indeed “Jewish and democratic: Democratic toward Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs.”  . . . Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can."