3/24/23

Friday, March 24, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:20. 30℉, high of 39, wind NE at 6 mph, up to 14 mph today and gusts up to 24mph, wind chill is 24℉.  Sunrise at 6:48, sunset at 7:08, 12+20.

LTMW at a red-bellied woodpecker breaking off a big chunk of suet and flying away with it.  Where is it going and why?  to eat the suet and seeds or to feed it to nestlings?  Probably too early for nestlings.  One snowbird on the ground, one red-bellied nuthatch on the sunflower tube.  Now a white-bellied nuthatch.  I need to fill the sunflower tube which is half-empty.  Snow expected tomorrow, perhaps another 4 to 6 inches of heavy wet snow that did so much damage to our trees last time.  Maybe the storm track will change, but not likely.  Maybe not as much wind as the last damaging storm.🙏

Starting the day with Gilead.  [John Ames is 76 and 77 years old as he writes his letter to his 7 year old son.]  Mrs. Ames provides John with the text of a sermon on forgiveness he wrote and deliver in June, 1947.  I read his summary of it 3 times and will probably read it again.  I thought of my struggle with anger and resentment when I learned that Peter and Michael had 'betrayed me' years ago, of sitting in the lower church of Gesu conscious of the burden of my anger and of reflecting on 'forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.'  And I thought that 1947 was the year 15 year of James Hartmann stole into our basement apartment with his knife when my father was working the 2nd shift at the Modess factory, and my mother was sleeping on the hide-away bed with Kitty and me, threatened to kill Kitty and me, ripped my mother's clothes off and sodomized her.  I was a month past my 6th birthday, Kitty had just turned 1, and my mother was 25.  I have repressed all memory of the crime itself but I still have a memory of part of the aftermath, policemen in the kitchen, me sitting on the floor in the living room leaning against the wall with my coat on, and my father angry and shouting at me for not watching Kitty.  I always pause and ponder as I remember that night and the fear I felt and, I suppose, the incomprehension.  I was in my coat (I surmise but don't remember) because Kitty and I were going to be taken to Aunt Monica's and my grandparents' house on Racine Avenue while my mother and father were taken to the Englewood police station.  That crime on that night put my mother and me in PTSD and undoubtedly deepened my father's war-related PTSD.  And here I am, sitting in the predawn darkness 75 and 1/2 years later still remembering what I remember and still repressing what I can.t remember but witnessed and was a part of.  I'm almost paralyzed with thoughts just as I am every time I think of that night, that crime, the defensive slash wounds on my mothr's arm and hand.  I think of John Ames' sermon on forgiveness and the difference between forgiveness of a wrong done to me and a wrong done to a loved one.  I've long wondered whatever became of 15 year old James Hartmann.  He had killed another woman with his knife the week before he raped my mother, Mrs. Gracelyn Bush.  She was 32 years old, the wife of a minister.  I find myself thinking of the similarity in the names of Mrs. Bush, Gracelyn, and the name of the author of Gilead, Marilynne, and of the fact that Mrs. Bush was the wife of a minister, causing me to wonder how John Ames would have written his 1947 sermon if he had experienced what Reverend Bush and my father did in 1947.   This is too heavy a way to start the day.  Ames ends this portion of his letter to his son sharing his memory of first encountering his wife, the son's mother:  " . . . this life has its own mortal loveliness.  And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either.  It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing.  A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that it's abiding is a most gracious reprieve."  Or a most grievous burden.

More Gilead: "There have been heroes here, and saints and martyrs, too, and I want you to know that.  Because that is the truth, even if no one remembers it.  To look at the place, it's just a cluster of houses strung out along a few roads, and a little row of brick buildings with stores in them, and a grain elevator and a water tower with Gilead written on its side, and the post office and the schools and the playing fields and the old train station which has pretty much gone to weeds now.  But what must Galilee have looked like?  You can't tell much from the appearance of a place."

I hav long believed, and said, that we are surrounded by saints and heroes and miracles if only we have the eyes to see them.  The saints and heroes that I have seen up close and personal are mainly my mother, my sister, and my wife.  Their saintliness and their heroism is of the type referred to explicitly in Mt. 25: 31-46 - my mother caring for her father and her brother James, and noursihing and protecting Kitty and me, and even standing by my father in his long years of need, though both Kitty and I wished during our childhoods that she would leave him.  Kitty and Geri both for their taking in my father in his old age, and caring for him when he would otherwise be so alone and lonely.  For Geri becoming his best friend and confiante in his last years and for her loving care of her brother Jim during Nancy's long last illness and when Jim was widow, like my father alone and lonely.  And for the love she gives me and her sons and Lilly.  And her visits to Elise, suffering from advancing Parkinson's disease.  I have been so blessed by such good, loving, strong women in my life.  Domine, non sum dignus . . .  As for miracles, they are all around us, as John Ames realizes.  He focuses on light, air, even gravity but more broadly on all Nature including other humans.  I tend to focus on birds and trees, forests and farm fields, barns and farm houses, so much else.  Even in the dumps, beset with pain or general gloominess, I can't forget all the saints, heroes, and miracles throughout my life.  For some reason, I am recalling Wally Halperin who employed me as a stock boy at his food and liquor store at 74th and Halsted during my senior year in high school.  When I was award the NROTC scholarship and was accepted at Marquette, Wally moved me from part-time to full-time at the store to let me earn some cash before moving to Milwaukee.  I worked the checkout counter as well as stocking shelves and coolers and the fruit and vegetable stands.  I was 17 years old and illegally checking out customers buying alcohol.  Each week a Chicago cop would come to the store for a payoff from Wally for overlooking the underaged clerk. Wally never told me this; I learned of it from other adult employees. Wally was kind to me, solicitous, when he didn't have to be.  He was my first Jewish friend, but far from the last.

VA Pelvis Floor therapy. I spent about 45 minutes with Jennifer most of it half-naked enduring a digital exam while discussing the NCAA basketball tournnment.  There are some men who would pay money to have a beautiful young woman probe their butt ; for me it's one of the indigniteis of old age and creeping decrepitude.