4/30/23

 Sunday, April 30, 2023

In bed at 10:30 after watching WH Correspondents' Dinner, awake at 4:30, up R 4:54, thoughts of pelvic floor therapy, having some pain, 38℉, high of 43, cloudy day ahead with rain in the afternoon,, wind W at 12 mph, 8 to 15 mph during the day, gusts up to 27 mph, wind chill is 31℉, expecting28 to 36℉ during this last day of April, sunrise at 5:46, sunset at 7:51, 14+5.

Fall of Saigon 1975.  48 years ago.  I think I can remember the emotion I felt on that day, watching the helicopters on the rooftop, the videos of the ship with the helicopter pushed overboard.  I can't describe it, but I remember it.  The culmination of the Dirty Dozen years from the1963 Kennedy assassination, the years of urban riots, draft protests, Vietnam, culture shock returning to US in 1966, Kent State, Army Math Center bombing, Weathermen, Watergate, Nixon resignation, fall of Saigon.  I'm stopped in my tracks just recalling those years, 

LTMW  at 8 a.m. at a flurry of birds at the feeders: goldfinches, sparrows, chickadees, red finches, downy woodpecker, and a solo Tom wild turkey in the side yard as I do my morning kitchen chores, probably having gleaned whatever he could from under the feeders.  Male cardinal also gleaning.  Snowbirds appear to have all flown north.  Birds leave as a squirrel hangs upside down working diligently on the suet cake.  Amazing agility.

Another bank bites the dust.  From this morning's NYT: "Federal regulators were racing on Saturday to seize and sell the troubled First Republic Bank before financial markets open on Monday, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, in a bid to put an end to a banking crisis that began last month with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.  The effort, led by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, comes after First Republic’s shares tumbled 75 percent since Monday, when the bank disclosed that customers had withdrawn more than half of its deposits. It became clear this past week that nobody was willing to ride to First Republic’s rescue before a government seizure because larger banks were worried that buying the company would saddle them with billions of dollars in losses."

Is the whole system tottering, or just fragile?  Where were the regulators?  Asleep at the switch?  or in the pockets of the bankers?

Biden's Bid for Reelection.  I am not a fan of Joe Biden.  Although he wears the persona of Uncle Joe, Joe Middle Class from Scranton, PA, just an ordinary guy like you and me who wants to do good for his fellow Just Plain Joes, and although I've been very pleased with the policies he has pursued since his election in 2020, I never lose sight of the facts that (1) he has an immense ego, (2) he has prodigious ambition, (3) he has seriously pursued the presidency since at least 1988, 35 years ago.  (Actually, his pursuit of the most powerful job in the world surely started well before 1988.) And (4) he has quite a history of playing loose with the truth.  Also, (5) while everybody appropriately sympathises with the deaths of his wife Neilia and one year old daughter Naomi in 1972, and with the death of his adult son Beau in 2015, I can't help thinking that he has milked those deaths endlessly for political purposes.  I know I am probably too harsh in that judgment but I wonder if there has ever been occasion when Biden could bring up the tragic losses in his life when he has chosen NOT to do so.  Finally, he has devoted his entire life to obtaining and holding on to political power, to getting elected and re-elected, with all that requires of a human being.  On top of all that, I hold political grudges and I can't forget his handling of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings in 1991, nor his leading role in making student loan debts non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.   In 2005, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, and its implications for student-loan borrowers were dire. As signed into law under former President George W. Bush, the bill expanded the undue hardship requirement to borrowers with private student loans, expanding the scope of borrowers who would have to prove their impossible predicament in court.  Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of Biden's 2020 rivals who pushed for expansive student debt cancellation, blasted the 2005 bankruptcy law, along with Biden's support of it.  "That bankruptcy bill made it impossible or very difficult for people to escape from that student debt," Sanders said during the primary debate. "It was a very, very bad bill."

And now octogenarian Joe is running for reelection AND keeping Kamala Harris as his running mate.  Quaere:  what are the odds of his dying in office or becoming incapacitated during a second term?  What are the chances of the nation ending up with a President or Acting President Kamal Harris even though she demonstrated in the 2020 election that she is not a popular candidate even among Democrats much less independents and Republicans?  Why has Biden frozen the field of Democratic candidates by announcing his bid for re-election?  Because ONLY he can beat the fascist Donald Trump, the likeliest Republican opponent?  Does Biden have such a low opinion of the other elected leaders in his own party that he believes NONE could compete with Trump?  NO ONE NOT ONE NOBODY?  What does that say of the Democratic Party, or at least of Joe Biden's view of the quality of potential Democratic candidates?  I believe Biden is running again for the same reason he ran in 1988 and in 2008: he wants the most prestigious and powerful job in the world.  And now that he has the job, he just doesn't want to give it up.  He wants to be King of the Hill and he is willing to risk losing his re-election bid (like Ford, Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump did) and ceding power to the many American fascisti rather than giving another Democrat a chance to succeed him.  I'm sick just thinking of the next 6 years.  As Biden so often (almost always inaptly) says "not a joke."

Not a happy camper!

Trip to Winkie's this afternoon to get a card for Peter's 16th birthday on Wednesday.  I dropped off the card and a cash gift along with the contribution to Drew's fundraising project at school - Gigi's Playhouse Down Syndrome Achievement Center.  Very gloomy day weather-wise, soft rain, heavy overcast skies, gray, gray, gray.

4/29/23

Saturday, April 29, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 2:30 with unpleasant dream of life at MULS, appointment as DCE, MKM & PKR & P&T committee, Steve Barkan, let Lilly out, she wanted her reward treat at 2:30.  39℉, high of 51℉, cloudy day ahead with rain, Wind W at 3 mph, 2 to 13 mph during the day, gusts up to 24 mph, sunrise at 5:48, sunset at 7:50, 14+2.

Hands.  I have been very conscious of my hands recently.  About a week ago I was in my recliner watching some program on the television with my hands folded.  I noticed how thin they are, skin and bone, and how prominent the blood vessels are.  The skin is so thin it drapes over the metacarpal bones between my wrists and my fingers, so thin that the blue of the veins is visible to the eye.  There appears to be no fat in my hands and little collagen in the skin, which gives me chicken or turkey skin.  I can feel all the bones, easily on the top of the hands, but even somewhat through the palms.  This awareness of my old man hands reminds me (though I need no reminding) that every organ, every part of my body has passed through 8 decades of living, of functioning, of working.  It is no surprise that, as my father used to say, 'my parts are wearing out' and that they often complain via aches and pains.  One of these days, one of these hours, one or more of my parts will go on strike, perhaps my brain, perhaps my heart, perhaps some other vital part.  Or a new part, a neoplasm, will take over and scuttle the ship

NC supreme court: From the NYT:  "Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.  The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.   The decision has major implications not just for the state legislature, where the G.O.P. is barely clinging to the supermajority status that makes its decisions veto-proof, but for the U.S. House, where a new North Carolina map could add at least three Republican seats in 2024 to what is now a razor-thin Republican majority. Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.

The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges — Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and others — have seen races for their high court seats turned into multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens."

Should we expect something different from states where the justices are appointed by partisan governors?  Under the Missouri plan?  As of 2016, 38 states have a form of merit-based selection and retention method for some or all judges.  Twenty-five states have a nominating commission to screen all candidates of the state courts of last resort. Eight states have commissions which fill interim vacancies on the highest courts.  Twenty states utilize retention elections for judges who wish to serve on highest state courts beyond their initial term.

You shall appoint for yourselves judges and officers, tribe by tribe, in every settlement which the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall dispense true justice to the people. You shall not pervert the course of justice nor shall you lift up faces nor shall you take a gift for a gift blinds the eyes of the wise and makes the just answer crookedly. Justice and justice alone shall you pursue ....Deuteronomy16: 18-20

If only . . .

Law was supervb as a code, and the more perfect and logical a code was, the more magnificent it was.  But this was at the cost of more artificiality, rendering it less capable of existing in reality.  Hence the opportunity to study and reflect on law offered the greatest satisfaction while the requirement to implement it was the saddest or most painful fate that could befall one.  The practice of law led either to cynicism or to madness.  We could see examples of the former all around us and, as for the latter, suffice it to recall Kafka, who, though few realized it, was a Prague lawyer.

Ivan Klima, Jude on Trial

 

I suppose I should be thankful that the practice of law led me only a a profound cynicism, and not to madness.  On the other hand, Kafka did pretty well.  Many of his works are still in print.

4/28/23

 Friday, April 28, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 6:20, 5 or so pss, thinking about estate at death, Andy's and Anh's retirement.  39℉, high of  54℉, cloudy all day, wind NE at 5 mph, gusts up to 13 mph.  The sun rose at 5:49, sunset at 7:40, 13+59.

FB Post this morning:  Amy Davidson Sorkin has a short piece in the current New Yorker - "What's Going on with Samuel Alito -." in which she asks "How many people and organizations can Justice Samuel Alito accuse of having bad will or dishonest motives in a short dissent—fewer than nine hundred words—to a Supreme Court order granting a stay?"  Alito's dissent in the mifepristone case is a short and worthwhile read, worthwhile insofar as it reveals just how cynical Alito is.  Clarence Thomas also dissented, but without stating his reasons.  What I hope we all remember is that these 2 men, the most reactionary members of the Court, were appointed by Republican 'moderates,' George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.  "“I have followed this man’s career for some time,” said President George H.W. Bush of Clarence Thomas in July 1991. “He is a delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor.”  George W. Bush sold himself to the American electorate as a "compassionate conservative." "In announcing Alito’s nomination, Bush said: “He’s scholarly, fair-minded and principled, and these qualities will serve him well on the highest court in the land. [His record] reveals a thoughtful judge who considers the legal merits carefully and applies the law in a principled fashion. He has a deep understanding of the proper role of judges in our society. He understands judges are to interpret the laws, not to impose their preferences or priorities on the people.”  The Bushes are perfect illustrations of why so-called Republican 'moderates' cannot be trusted with governmental power.  First, it is always a fair question to what degree their 'moderateness" masks a deep-seated reactionary conservatism.  Second, even 'moderate' Republicans feel the need to satisfy their right-wing colleagues by appointing the likes of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.  The frightening state our country is in today can, in large measure, be laid at the feet of those "moderate Republicans," George H. W. and George W. Bush.  More's the pity.

A painting I did of Willie Horton and George H. W. Bush decades ago

FB post yesterday.  Tom Friedman, quoting Bernard-Henri Levy, speaks for most of us whose long lives are mostly behind us: " . . . the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren might collapse.”  When I watch young neighbors walking their children along our street, or see parents walk their children into Kopp's for a frozen custard, or see scores of children as school lets out  for the day walking home or getting into their buses, I almost inevitably have two emotional responses: elation, simply from the beauty of the children and of parents caring for children, and trepidation, sometimes dread, knowing and fearing  the dangers in the world they are growing into.  Friedman points to Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump (and Viktor Orban) as emblematic of those growing fascistic dangers, but what is most frightening is knowing that each of those menacing leaders attained and holds power only because of the support of millions of followers.     

"It’s OK to Be Single, the Church of England Says: So Was Jesus"  Where exactly in the New Testatment does it say that Jesus was single, in the sense of unmarried and never married?  I've long thought it unlikely that Jesus was simply "a bachelor," as our friend and gay neighbor John McGivern's mother used to refer to him.  Jewish men in Galilee 2,000 years ago expected to 'be fruitful and multiply," to augment the population of the Chosen People.  Men and women were expected to marry and bear children and there is no reason to think that Jesus was the weirdo in Nazareth who went through his entire late teens and 20s without marrying.  That he was apparently unmarried at age 30 or so when he began his 'public life' suggests to me that he was a widower who lost his wife and probably their child in childbirth.  Perhaps it was such a devastating loss that led him into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights.  Who knows?  It is mere speculation, of course, but so is the belief that Jesus had not been married before the start of his public life.  My speculation seems at least as likely as the speculation that Jesus was a lifelong bachelor, perhaps a 'gay blade.'  Who knows?

In any event, it's nice that the Anglicans have at long last accepted that life is complicated and often hard and that people are varied, some drawn towards coupling up, some towards not coupling up.  Some left-handed, some right-handed, some light-skinned, some dark-skinned.  Some straight, some gay, some both, some confused.  Different strokes for different folks.  We need to get used to it, but of course we won't.

Good Bones 

BY MAGGIE SMITH

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.

 

4/27/23

 Thursday, April 27, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 11:30 with GERD, on the bedroom recliner until 2:05, up at 6:05, 6 pss.  Mostly sunny day ahead, 35℉, high of 57℉, S wind at 8 mph, 4 to 13 mph during the day, gusts up to 20, current wind chill is 28℉.  Sun rose at 5:49, sunset at 7:48, 13+57.

Mum  Geri came upon this series on BritBox a couple of night ago after I had gone to bed.  We both really enjoy it.  The heroine is Cathy, a 59, then 60 year old widow who lost her husband less than 2 years ago.  She lives with her son Jason and his girlfriend Kelly and her mother-in-law Maureen and father-in-law Reg, and is frequently visited by her brother Derek and his divorced lady friend Pauline.  She is also visited by Michael, a long-term friend of hers and her late husband Dave.  Michael has secretly been in love with Cathy (played by Lesley Manville) since the day he met her, though she was married to his friend Dave.  The series focuses on Cathy's evolving love for Michael, despite opposition from her son Jason and despite some feelings of guilt because of her fairly recent widowhood.  Cathy and Michael are serious characters but they play their parts against a constant background of buffoonery by Cathy's family, especially by Kelly (played by Lisa McGrillis) who is the epitome of obtuseness, insensitivity, and an absence of filters in her comments to Cathy.  She represents these qualities too often found in young people dealing with elderly relatives.  Son Jason represents the adult son who continues to rely on, i.e., take advantage of, his mother for housing, housekeeping, and general care.  Derek is a bit of a dullard hopelessly in love with Pauline, a demanding snob and a master of down-putting comments to others, including Cathy and Derek.  Reg and Maureen round out the characters as cantankerous oldsters.  The series reminds me a bit of Schitt's Creek, with the comic characters (i.e., those other than Cathy and Michael) hilariously playing their over-the-top roles.

Sherwood.  I'm also watching this BBC series on BritBox, based on 2 murders in a Nottinghamshire coal mining village.  The villagers are still divided between the strikers who went out on strike in 1984-85 during the Margaret Thatcher regime and those who crossed the picket lines, the 'scabs.'  An important part of the plot is the belief among the villagers that during the strike, Thatcher's government placed a 'spy cop' in their village, a spy who integrated himself or herself into village life, and made regular reports to the government in London about the strikers and the scabs.  I've watched 4 or the 6 episodes and don't know how the mystery of the spy and the murders is resolved. . . . . . .  I watched the last two episodes today.  Feel good ending, but good rendition of the damage done to individuals and the community by the hatred between the strikers and the 'scabs.'  Terrific series, very serious.

VA Urology Clinic.  10 minute visit with the urologist.  Should have been handled by phone.  Interesting that he agreed with my decision not to take the med he had prescribed for me because of uncertainty re therapeutic benefit (pain relief) and side effects, especially for elderly.

  

4/26/23

 Wednesday, April 26, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 6, but 6 pss, foggy brain, perseverating on the chorus lines of JO's It's Over,k Goodbye the last couple of days.  34℉, sunny morning, partly cloudy afternoon, wind N at 5 mph, 2 to 9 mph today, gusts up to 15 mph, high of 45℉.  The sun rose at 5:51, sunset at 9:47, 13+54.

Jane Olivor - It's over Goodbye

It's Over Goodbye
Can't say that we didn't try
In all of those years
hiding our tears
and the sorrows we felt deep inside

Standing so close to you
Yet we are alone
never sharing the life that we knew
you know that it's true
we only grew apart
and it hurts so bad
to find the love you lost you never had

and it hurts so bad
to find the love you lost you never had

There's children you know
That makes it so hard  to go
And I'm sure it comes as no surprise
And I must have seen it in your eyes
A hundred times or so
It's over goodbye
Time never was on our side
And though I may live to forget
I never will forget the days I spent with you

And it hurts so bad
to find the love you lost you never had

And it hurts so bad
to find the love you lost you never had

[An incredibly sad song.😞]

Chronic Pain was bad yesterday.  It's been a problem since my last therapy session at the VA.  It was problematic during the night also.  Keeping my fingers crossed for today.  I know I'm not fit company for anyone, i.e., Geri, when I'm experiencing hours of discomfort and pain.  

This morning's JSOnline:  New downtown Milwaukee plan includes a focus on removing I-794 and a renewed MacArthur Square.  My first thought on reading this lead article in this morning's paper was that I will be dead when (and if) these redevelopment changes occur, which supposedly will be by 2040 when I would be, God forbid, 99 years old.  My second thought is that redeveloping the downtown living working, and entertainment spaces seems a bit like a misplaced priority.  Milwaukee's biggest challenge is poverty and crime, both largely race-based.  A beautiful downtown area (including the Marquettte campus) loses a lot of luster when it is largely surrounded by an inner city that is home to violent criminals who prey on people attracted to the lustrous venues.  I can get to the VA in 20 minutes on a good day but I fear going on our multi-million dollar I-43 because of increasingly common freeway shootings usually involving, I suspect, inner-city drivers.  In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the privileged people lived in the city above ground, while the workers lived and worked underground.  In American cities, the privileged people live in condos and apartments downtown or in fine single-family homes in the suburbs while hoi polloi, the plebs, the great unwashed, live in between in the Inner City.

Three Lakes, in Oneida County, is where my fishing friends and I would head in September or October every year for muskie fishing.  The other days I could not remember the names of the 'regulars' which, for some unknown reason, came to me this morning.  George Wangaard, now dead, Bill Dombrowski, originally from Chicago, Ken Halvorsen, John Gerlach, Doug Wenger, Bill and Ron Meltzer, and one other, his name escaping me now.

Peripheral Neuropathy/Lymphedema.  Nasty tonight, even with compression socks on for 10 hours or so, worse on my left foot, but my right foot also.

4/25/23

 Tuesday, April 25, 2023

In bed at 10:30, up at 6:15.  36℉, high of 43, cloudy morning, sunny afternoon, .15" of rain overnight, wind NE at 6 mph, 2 to 11 mph today, gusts up to 17 mph.  Sun rose at 5:52, sunset at 7:45, 13+52.

Apartment living.  The city has given preliminary approval for the construction of a 25-story apartment building at Farwell and Curtis.  It looks pretty spectacular, with a rooftop swimming pool, abundant parking, and half the units with views of Lake Michigan.  It reminds me a bit of living in our condo in the Knickerbocker Hotel, and how much I miss the condo and the neighborhood.  We bought the condo for $81,000.  I can't even guess what it might be worth today.  It also reminds me, though, of what a tremendous change apartment/condo living would be from our lives in Bayside and outside of Saukville.  In Saukville, we had 4 bedrooms and almost 3 and 1/2 acres of land, including some bogland.  In Bayside, we have 'only' .62 acre and 3 bedrooms, but probably approaching 4,000 square feet of residence including the improved, and used, section of the basement.  Moving to an apartment or condo would involve some HUGE downsizing, physically, mentally, and probably emotionally.  Daunting.

RIP Harry Belafonte, 97.

Man Smart, Woman Smarter

I say let us put man and woman together

To find out which one is smarter

Some say man, but I say no

The women got the men beat, they should know

[Chorus]

And not me, but the people they say

That the man are leading the women astray

But I say that the women of today

Smarter than the man in every way

Ah, ever since the world began

Woman was always teaching man

And if you listen to my bid attentively

I goin' tell you how she smarter than me . . . 

Jack has me stymied.  As much as I enjoyed (not really the right word) Gilead, Home, and Lila, I just can't get into the last of the Gilead quartet.  I had expected this story to be perhaps the most interesting, though it would be hard to outdo Lila in that respect, but I am finding it just a drag, appropriately set in a cemetery, at night no less.  It is hard to get a sense of just when in the history of the relationship between Jack and Della this graveyard rendezvous occurs.  Also, hard to continue reading the dialogue reflecting Jack's moroseness and self-loathing or at least self-deprecation.  I need to take a break.

2 P.M.  A lot of pain today, all day and evening.

4/24/2023

 Monday, April 24, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake at 5:25, up at 5:35, with muddled thoughts.  33℉, high of 46℉, sunny morning ahead, cloudy afternoon and evening, W wind at 7 mph, gusts up to 13 mph.  Sunrise at 5:55, sunset at 7:45, 13+49.

Dinner last night was leftover rice pilaf with diced lamb.

Ice and Snow: Last night, as I walked our trash cart down our sloping driveway to the street for pickup this morning, I thought to myself we've made it through another winter, another season of high risk from ice and snow.  Phew.

Jack by Marilynne Robinson.  I'm only about 10% into it, but it's sure a slow start: a meeting between Jack Boughton and his beloved Della Miles in a cemetery.  I can't tell yet how this meeting came about or where Jack and Della (or the author) are heading.

Tree of Life trial begins today, 4 and 1/2 years after the gunman killed 11 at the synagogue.  The killing occurred on October 27, 2018, Shabbat.  On November 5, 2018, I wrote: "I read that the Squirrel Hill terrorist wanted to "kill all Jews" even as he was wheeled into the ER at the hospital where the doctor and nurse who treated him were Jews.  In BadDreamLand, I had a vision of the murderer's wish being granted.  Suddenly his treating physician and attending nurse disappeared. Then all the Jewish doctors and nurses that treat and have treated me and my family through a long life disappeared.  Poof.  Then I recalled Itzhak Perlman on the Steven Colbert Show playing "Someone to Watch Over Me" and Itzhak disappeared as did the song's composer, Jacob Gershvin a/k/a George Gershwin,  and the beautiful song itself, along with Rhapsody in Blue and everything else that Jacob/George created to share with the world.  Poof.  Then I thought of Israel Beilin a/k/a Irving Berlin vanishing along with his gifts to the world God Bless America, White Christmas, and hundreds of others.  Gone.  Then I hallucinated Robert Allen Zimmerman a/k/a Bob Dylan disappearing with Blowing in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin', and so much more.  Then Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Billy Joel, Piano Man, My Life, Uptown Girl, Carole Joan Klein a/k/a Carole King,  So Far Away, It's Too Late, Tapestry,  Neil Diamond, Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show, Sweet Caroline, Barbra Streisand, People, The Way We Were. All gone the disappeared Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler. Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman, Ziggy Elman, Herbie Mann, so many musicians, so much soul-expanding music - gone. And all those humorists who brought so much joy and laughter to my life - Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder, the Marx brothers, Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Larry David, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Benny, Mort Sahl,  Lenny Bruce, George Burns, and Al Franklin - so many humorists, so many smiles, chuckles, and belly laughs, taken away - poof.  And all those great scientists, like Abram Saperstein, a/k/a Albert Sabin who gave us the oral polio vaccine, Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, Paul Ehrlich who developed the first cure for the worldwide scourge of syphilis and who helped cure diphtheria, Albert Einstein who showed us E=mc squared, relativity and black holes.  Then my frightening dream became even more nightmarish when I saw disappearing all the many Jews who have personally enriched my life with their friendship, those I worked with and those who share and have shared their homes and their hearts with me and my family, who have lovingly shared their wise counsel with me when I most needed it, who have shared their marriages, funerals, britot, b'nai and b'not mitzah, Shabbat services and seders and who have accepted me despite my faults and failings, my spiritual and emotional mishpuchah.  As my nightmare took all of them away from me I couldn't take it anymore and woke up trembling and repeating don't go, don't go.  And though I'm not a pray-er, I found myself saying Please God - no, never."  I could have added so many more to the list, like a favorite chanteuse of mine, Jane Olivor, born Linda Cohen in Brooklyn.

Fredi Miller, Geri's dear friend and her longtime roommate when they traveled together on law school recruitment trips, has had a home in Squirrel Hill for many years.  Fredi is Jewish but was not a member of any of the 3 congregations who had Tree of Life as their home shul.  I remember Geri on the telephone with Fredi that terrible day.

One of the things that struck me about the crime was the ages of the victims: Joyce Fienberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger, 97; Daniel Stein, 71; Melvin Wax, 87; Irving Younger, 69; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; the couple Bernice, 84, and Sylvan Simon, 87; and the brothers Cecil, 59, and David Rosenthal, 54.  To have lived so long, to have died so horribly.

Another thing that struck me was that Tree of Life housed 3 separate congregations, reminding me of the joke about the Jewish man stranded on a mid-ocean island who built 2 synagogues, one to worship in, the other 'I wouldn't set foot it.'   How religion calls us together but also sets us apart from one another.

I am a bit surprised that Merrick Garland has authorized his DOJ attorneys to seek the death penalty in this case, but perhaps I shouldn't be.  If any situation calls for it, Tree of Life is surely one of them, but the DOJ rarely pursues capital punishment.  DOJ justifies it here because of the defendant's long history of anti-semitism, pre-planning, etc.  I can't remember a time in my own life when I have favored the death penalty, regardless of the heinousness, the ruthlessness of the crime(s).

Our Tree of Life mezuzah

Merit Ultralite Menthol 100s, please.  I started smoking, surreptitiously, when I was 15 years old.  The brand name of my first pack of cigarettes was "Spud."  The cigarettes were mentholated.  Wikipedia: "Menthol cigarettes were first developed by Lloyd "Spud" Hughes of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in 1924, though the idea did not become popular until the Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. acquired the patent in 1927, marketing them nationwide as "Spud Menthol Cooled Cigarettes". Spud brand menthol cigarettes went on to become the fifth most popular brand in the US by 1932, and it remained the only menthol cigarette on the market until the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company created the Kool brand in 1933."  When I was 16, I worked up the courage to ask my parents, both smokers, for permission to smoke.  They gave their permission with the warning that it was habit-forming and 'unhealthy' and expensive.  I don't recall ever smoking at home.  As an adult, I quit smoking once for 3 years and I don't remember why I took up the habit again.  In any event, before I finally quit in 1994 at the age of 53, I smoked a pack a day of Merit Ultralite Menthol 100 cigarettes.  The first U.S. Surgeon General's Report on smoking and lung cancer and chronic bronchitis was issued in January of 1964, confirming what just about everybody already knew, i.e., that smoking can kill you and I worried from at least that time until I finally quit in 1994 that I would get lung cancer.  As it has turned out, at least so far, I haven't developed that disease, but my dear sister, also a smoker (of Pall Malls, my parents' brand) came down with and ultimately died from COPD caused by those cigarettes.

I'm thinking of this history because of the story in this morning's NYT that New York's governor is trying to ban menthol cigarettes in the state of New York and the effort is causing a ton of controversy.  According to the news item, the effort is an attempt to reduce the incidence of lung cancer among Blacks, especially Black men who have the highest rates of lung cancer and who favor menthol cigarettes. California and Massachusetts already have banned menthol cigarettes as have the EU, Canada, Brazil, and the UK.  This issue regarding menthol cigarettes seems so emblematic of the divide between Reds and Blues in our country.  There is no 'right' answer.  One of the many arguments against the ban is fear that banning a consumer product used so much by Black men will provide another occasion for police officers to engage in oppressive behavior against Black men.  It reminds me of course of Eric Garner and the stranglehold that killed him when he was arrested to selling 'loosies' on Staten Island.  There are broader public health and liberty issues of course, including encouragement of a black market and paternalism, protecting Black men from their own otherwise lawful behaviors.  Meanwhile, I think to myself every now and then, especially while watching films in which the characters do a lot of smoking, I miss those Merit Ultralite Menthol 100s.

Starting a painting of Trump in the Dock. From the New Yorker cover art.  Started with grid lines and a rough sketch.

LTMW at 7:35 p.m.  A solitary wild turkey has come to the bird feeders to glean whatever is available on the ground underneath.

Geri is tending Ellis and Cocoa while David returns from Portland, OR and Sharon is also out of town. Geri texted at David will be in at about 9.

4/23/23

 Sunday, April 23, 2023

I typed up a long narrative describing a trip Geri and I took from Paris to Abbaye St. Pierre in Solesmes, France, in December, 1994.  I tried to paste a copy of a photo of the dining room in the Grand Hotel de Solesmes into the text and failed but also somehow made it impossible to see any of the narrative.  Alas, it is a good and true story.😡 but I am too tired after last night's dinner with the Goldbergs and the Lowes to tell the tale again.  Maybe later.👃

Bony Maroney

In December 1994, Geri and I went to Paris and decided to visit Ckartres and the Benedictine Abby at Solesmes, in the Pays de Loire district while we were in France.  Correction: I wanted to visit the monastery to listen to the monks chant, which they are famous for.  Geri agreed to come along, though she had no particular interest.  We got out of bed in our cheap hotel, walked in the cold, dark Paris morning to the Montparnasse train station, and caught the early train to Sablé-sur-Sarthe.  After a near 2 hour ride through the dark predawn hours, we arrived at an empty train station in Sablé: no people, no taxis, no buses.  We started walking into town to look for a taxi (no luck) and encountered a man whom I addressed in my college French, asking where the monestery is and how we can get there.  He informed us we were going the wrong way and that there were no taxis at that hour.  We retraced our steps and started walking in the direction of the abby but by this time it was raining.  We walked on the road paralleling the Sarthe River for about an hour without encountering a taxi or a car that would offer us a ride.  It rained the whole time soaking my trenchcoat and Geri's heavy wool winter coat.  By the time we reached the abby, we were worn out, cold, wet, and thoroughly miserable AND we couldn't find the entrance to the chapel where the morning mass and chanting were to be found.  I wanted to forget about it and seek shelter in the hotel across the road from the abby but Geri, having endured so much to get this far, insisted we persist in finding the door to the chapel which we eventually did.  As we entered the chapel, the mass was already in progress with only a few worshippers in the pews.  We were so cold, wet, and stiff from the freezing rain that we were unable to sit, kneel, and stand along with the other folks attending the service.  When the service was completed, we went across the road to the hotel where a very gracious hostess told us that, alas, we were too late for breakfast in the restaurant and too early for lunch, but she brought us some very welcome hot coffee while we waited.  Before lunchtime, I told Geri that the chanting we heard in the morning service was part of the canonical hour known as Prime and that we would soon be able to hear more chanting at the canonical hour known as Terce.  For some reason, this propect did not excite Geri (?!?) so she stayed in the dry, warm, hospitable hotel with more comforting coffee while I trudged across the road again to hear more chanting and to buy a couple of CDs in the abby gift shop.  The CDs have long since disappeared.  I returned to the hotel where we had a delicious lunch, of what dishes I can't recall, called for a taxi to return us to the Sablé train station, and returned to Paris, exhausted.  The remarkable part of this story: Geri never complained to me, much less smote me about the head and shoulders, for leading her on this miserable misadventure.  She never took me to task for my failure to plan and make arrangements for transportation from Sablé to Solesmes so as to avoid the need for an hour long hike through the French countryside in the cold and rain of a bleak December morning.  Sablé-sur-Sarthe is near the 48th parallel; Milwaukee is at about the 43rd parallel, which is to say, lousy weather in December in that region was predictable for a savvy traveler, which I clearly was not.  I knew on that day, and I know today,  that I was and am a fortunate man to have a wife who did not berate me, if not revile and smite me, for devoting a day of our French holidays to seeking out a chorus of Benedictine monks chanting in the middle of nowhere in west central France in December.  

4/22/23

 Saturday, April 22, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 6:44 after a restless night with 6 pss.  One dream of Mike McChrystal in Traverse City, waking thoughts of TSJ.  35℉, high of 43℉, cloudy day, wind W at 6 mph, gusts up to 23 mph today, Sun rose at 5:57, sets at 7:42, 13+44

Earl and Clyde morning.  Making coffee I was reminded of an old Pickles cartoon strip in which Earl and his buddy Clyde are sitting on a park bench.  Clyde says to Earl: 'How are you?" and Earl replies "Fine, And you?" to which Clyde replies "Fine."  Earl then says 'Actually, I'm feeling kinda crappy.' Clyde replies "Yeah, me too."

WaPo covers Ottawa County, MI.  "Sylvia Rhodea, the [county] board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said. . . Rhodea’s resolution continued on for 20 “whereases,” connecting the current motto to a broader effort that she said aimed to “divide people by race,” reduce their “personal agency,” and teach them to “hate America and doubt the goodness of her people.”  Her proposed alternative, she said, sought to unite county residents around America’s “true history” as a “land of systemic opportunity built on the Constitution, Christianity, and capitalism.’”  She flipped to her resolution’s final page and leaned closer to the mic. “Now, therefore, let it be resolved that the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners establishes a new county vision statement and motto of ‘Where Freedom Rings.’"

My take: what this Christian nationalist claims are the building blocks of America's 'systemic opportunity' are precisely what I think are the major problems in American society: the Constitution, Christianity, and capitalism."  Also, the right wing meaning of "freedom" is the freedom/license to oppress or harm others less powerful than the powerful.

(To be continued)

Dinner guests + Geek Squad.  Geek Squad arrived at 3:30 and installed an EERO Mesh system to replace Spectrum router and 2 extenders.  Caren & Dan, David & Pip coming for dinner at 6.

Marilynne Robinson on YouTube.  At the Library of Congress "Fiction, Faith, and the Imagination"  with 3 other authors Geraldine Brooks, Alan Lightman, and Paul Harding.  I liked Paul Harding (actually all of them) a lot, and ordered his novel "Tinkers" from Amazon Kindle.

Marilynne Robinson's Jack.  I bought my Kindle edition and just started reading it.

4/21/23

 Friday, April 23, 2023

In bed at (:30, awake at 1:30, up at 2:00, unable to sleep, dreaming of meeting Susan Friebert's father at a movie theater, speaking of RHF's parents, brothers Marvin and Jerry at Radio Doctor's at 3rd and Wells St., Jon, Ellen, and Leslie.  45℉, wind SW at 13 mph, high of 59℉, daytime mix of sun and cloudsl with shower this afternoon, wind gusts to 32 mph, sunrise at 6:00, sunset at 7:41, 13+41.

Reading Lila at 2 in the morning.  Lila's baby arrives in March some time after an Iowa Spring blizzard.  "No one came to look in on them because the drifts were too deep to walk through and the wind was fierce. People can get lost in a storm like that and just die in the road outside their own gate the way they might if they were wandering through a country they’d never seen before, . . . Then he’d say he ought to clear a path to the road and even get up from his chair, but the road was so deep in drifts there’d be no point in it. There’d be nowhere to go if he ever got to the road. The telephone wires were down and the electrical lines, too, but they had the woodstove and a kerosene lamp and Mrs. Somebody’s meat loaf to warm in the oven."

I'm reminded of my father taking me on a train from Chicago to Iowa once he was out of the Marines and being there during what to me was a huge snowstorm.  Was it in 1946, or was it later.? I remember having motion sickness on the train, and vomiting, some of it getting on the uniform of a Marine or soldier, maybe coming home after his discharge.  I remember a struggle to open a storm door because of the deep snow blow against it.  I remember being on a farm or maybe just a house where there were chickens and someone showing me how to put a chicken to sleep, tucking its head under a wing and rocking it. (?)  As I pull up my few memories of that trip, I wonder about all that I didn't and don't know about it.  Why was I taken to Iowa with my father and his PTSD?  Why weren't my mother and Kitty with us?  Were they separating?  Was he running away from strife, from heartache, from responsibilites, as he fled to Florida when my mother died?  I'm recalling Geri telling me that my Dad told her than my mother never wrote him while he was in the Marines.  If that was true, it was so inconsistent with her remaining with him after the war and was so uncharacteristic of her.  Did she believe that he abandoned her by not invoking his exemption from the draft for working in a war-related industry, and having one child and another on the way?  Did we visit his cousin Keith in Duncombe or elsewhere in Webster County?  Grandma Miler and Albert in Amana? or Newton? or Fort Dodge?  If it was, as I suspect, the Spring of 1946, I was 5 years old and we were living in that basement flat at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue, we and the 'waterbugs.'  Memories and mysteries come back reading of the Spring blizzard in Gilead. [And Lilly comes out from Geri's bedroom at 3 a.m. for a drink of water, a trip outside, a beef jerky treat, another drink of water, and back to bed.]

 "You turned into a perfectly fine baby. Maybe your father has enough years left in him to see you turn into a perfectly fine boy. And maybe not.  Old men are hard to keep.  Lila knew what would really happen next. One day she and the child would watch them lower John Ames into his grave, Mrs. Ames on one side and his father, John Ames, on the other, and his mother and that boy John Ames and his sisters, a little garden of Ameses, all planted there waiting She knew it was ridiculous, but she always imagined them coming up some June day, right through the roses, not breaking a stem or bruising a petal. Shaking hands, patting backs, too taken up with it all to notice her flowers. . ."

Matthew 27: 50-52: "When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He yielded up His spirit.  At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split. The tombs broke open, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised.  After Jesus’ resurrection, when they had come out of the tombs, they entered the holy city and appeared to many people.…" 😱😨😫😬 and not to mention Lazarus, brother of Martha and Mary. John 11: 38-44.

I finished Lila and feel a bit worn out by it.  Each of Robinson's novels is a workout.  They are all character studies in depth and they all explore human nature itself, 'the human condition,' and the idea of a God, especially as imagined in Christianity, Protestant Christianity.  Robinson doesn't offer glib answers to deep philosophical, theological questions.  She doesn't shy away from the contradictions that abound in the Bible and in Christian beliefs.  Both Ames and Boughton wrestle with and argue about the doctrines and are unable to provide answers to Jack Boughton or to Lila Dahl Ames.  All the principal characters struggle with loneliness, especially the natural heathens, Jack and Lila, but also Ames and to a lessser extent Boughton.  The attention to the loneliness of the characters make the stories seem almost Existentialist, not so much like Sartre's Huis Clos, but more like Camus' "L'Estranger," again especially for Jack and Lila.  On the other hand, Robinson must have a warmer view of humankind than the post-war existentialists had, they whose spiritual wounds from Europe's war were much more intense and recent than anything Robinson would have experiened growing up after WW II in Idaho.  I'll order the Kindle edition of Jack today but wonder if I should wait awhile before diving into it.  (I was a bit surprised that Jack Boughton received scant attention in Lila since the two characters were somewhat kindred spirits, lost souls, in Gilead and Lila.)    I may need a break from Robinson's deep dives in la condition humaine.

7:20 a.m.  Through my bathroom window I saw a robin fly onto a low branch, then a higher one, on our bottlebrush buckeye tree with a long strand of dead foliage in her beak.  Then she flew up toward the eaves on the back of our house.  I'll check later to see if that is where she is building her nest.  Meanwhile, I'll continue to be thrilled by the fact that birds build nests and how they do it.  And by so many other facts about 'birdbrains.'  And, BTW, all seeds are gone in the squirrel-proof feeder, 

9:00 a.m.  Another sign Spring has sprung - the lawn needs mowing.  It seems like only a couple of weeks ago we paid for the last driveway plowing.

4/20/23

 Thursday, April 20, 2023

In bed at 10:15, awake at 3:35, up at 4:05, unable to sleep, CPP spasms.  42℉ in a thunderstorm, one of many expected all day, high of 66℉, wind ESE at 11 mph, gusts up to 32 mph during the day, humidity at 88%, averaging 80% today.  Sunrise at 6:01, sunset at 7:40, 13+38.   

America and guns, mass shootings, solo shootings, shootings, shootings, endless shootings.  Ezekiel  5:14: Moreover I will make thee a desolation and a reproach among the nations that are round about thee, in the sight of all that pass by. So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an astonishment, unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall execute judgments on thee in anger and in wrath, and in wrathful rebukes.  In mass shootings, the shooter is usually White.  In most 'ordinary' urban shootings, the shooter(s) is Black.  In the Dadeville, Alabama shooting at a 'sweet 16' birthday party in which 4 people were killed and 32 wounded, the news stories as usual didn't expressly provide the race of the partygoers, but the given names of the deceased victims made it clear: Marsiah, Philstavious, Dahmontrey, and Shaunkivia.  WaPo: "The weekend’s gun violence in Dadeville is the latest among a staggering number of mass killings this year that has ravaged the nation. Less than four months into 2023, there have been 163 mass shootings that have killed 228 people and injured 638, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. The group defines mass shootings as those in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed." 

EveryStat website analyses gun violence data from CDC and reports: Black people are 12 times more likely than White people to die by gun homicide.  78% of all homicides in the U.S. involve a gun.  Nationally, 17,730 people die by gun violence  (homicides/suicides) every year; in Wisconsin, the number is 223.  Black people in Wisconsin are 32 times more likely than white people to die by gun homicide.  1.1 White person per 100,000 vs. Black persons per 100,000.  In an average year, 641 people die and 1.028 are wounded by guns in Wisconsin.  68% are suicides, 28% are homicides.  Suicides are overwhelmingly White, and homicides are overwhelmingly Black.  In Wisconsin, an average of 51 children and teens die by guns every year; 43% of these deaths are suicides and 51% are homicides.  Intimate partner homicides in Wisconsin per 1M people:  Black = 20.1, Hispanic = 5.9, White = 2.5.

Lila.  "A child is just a child. It can’t help what happens to it, or doesn’t happen. The woman’s voice calling after them from the cabin, Lila probably made that up. She could never ask. Doll said, Nobody going to come looking for her. And for a while nobody did. There must have been someone Lila hoped would call after them, someone a little sorry she’d be gone."

The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland / Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island / Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rats; / There we've hid our faery vats,

Full of berrys / And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand, /For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

You Wanna Be Loved, Jane Oliver

Every night you sit and watch the TV screen, / And the life you lead in only in your dreams, / But I think I know / What it is on your mind, / yes I think I know / What you're thinking 'bout all the time, / You wanna be loved, / You wanna know somebody somewhere cares, / You wanna be loved / Somehow, some way, somewhere / Hold me, hold me, you dream of someone saying that to you, / Love me, love me, / You only wish you had someone to say it to. / You wanna be loved, / You wanna know somebody somewhere cares, / You wanna be loved, / Somehow, some way, somewhere . . .

. . . . . . . . 

Lila has a recurring dream.  It is a dream of Doll's dead body lying in a field, perhaps a cornfield, flattened out and matter after a winter's weathering.  Doll's body all alone, Doll having died all alone, hiding in a cornfield.  A heartbreaking, heart-aching dream.  Reminds me of my recurring dream from Hartmann's crime.   Was I replicating what I did that night, loud moaning, fear?

LTMW at the wire suet cake holder I enlisted to hold lint and to which Geri added Lilly hair for nesting material for the birds and, sure enough, a red-bellied nuthatch is vigorously pulling out material for nest-building somewhere.  I told Geri about the nuthatch when she returned from MetroMarket, and she searched for and found some very fine twigs that seemed ideal for nesting and added them to the suet holder.  Also, I filled the sunflower tube which was almost empty, and also half-filled the long-neglected squirrel-proof feeder which I'm sure is a way station for our white-tailed neighbors.  I expect to find it empty tomorrow morning, which will confirm my suspicion about the white-tails.

Random Thought:  I'm an old man living with my old wife and our old dog in our old house.

The bench in the backyard marginal garden

4/19/23

 Wednesday, April 19, 2023

In bed around 10:30, up at 7 in a brain fog,, half-dreaming of Dad and his friend Art in Florida.  38℉, high of 45℉, 0.15" of rain expected today, E wind at 14 mph, gusts up to 30 mph, wind chills from 29 to 38℉ today, sunrose at 6:03, sunset at 7:39,  13+35.

VA this morning.  Pelvic floor muscle therapy with Jennifer Garrison.  I found out she's been at Zablocki for 15 years and started the pelvic floor program 12 years ago.  She's 39 years old, which surprised me.  I might have thought 29.  We discussed the childcare challenge in the U.S., which was the topic of a WUWM program I listened to on the way to Zablocki.  I confessed that it made me angry to compare the U.S. to Denmark, e.g.  I didn't bring up the basic reason for the big differences, i.e., relative ethnic/racial homogeneity in Denmark vs. heterogeneity in the U.S., especially Blacks.

Lila has captivated me.  It's the 3rd consecutive novel of the Gilead set if 4 that I have read and each has captured my attention more than the preceding one(s).  I have such a sense of intimacy with the main characters, starting with John Ames, then on to Glory Boughton and her brother Jack, and now Lila Dahl Ames.  I omit Robert Boughton because, although he is Ames' best friend and Glory and Jack's father, he seems less complex than the others and more dogmatic.  Loneliness is a major theme in the novels and Jack and Lila are the loneliest of the characters.  Lila's loneliness, her untrusting, wary nature, is easier to understand than Jack's.  She is the 'non-victim' of a kidnapping, who lived a life with her loving kidnapper, always on the run, wary of everyone.  Robinson creates quite a vivid sense of the hardscrabble lives of itinerant farm workers during the 1930s, usually on the road moving from farm to farm, town to town, looking for work, homeless and often hungry.

The relationship between Lila and John Ames seems so unlikely that it could be a 'jump the shark' feature of the novel, but it somehow works.  Who can explain how some couples come together, especially those who seem most unlikely as life partners?  I suspect it was precisely her oddness, her aloneness, her poverty that attracted John Ames' attention to her in the first place, seeing her sitting by herself in the last pew in his church on Pentecost Sunday.  She wasn't a part of his congregation, nor of the community in which they all lived, and as it turned out, she was profoundly different from those regular members of his community.  Lila was attracted to him because he also was so very different from her and from the migrant farmhands she grew up and lived with, and especially from her protector/kidnapper Doll.  Doll was cynical; 'the old man' was the opposite.  Doll was always 'on the run' and hiding herself; 'the old man' was as settled in Gilead as he could be, having lived 74 of his 76 years there, son and grandson of Congregationalist pastors.  Plus, 'the old man' seemed to be kind and caring (and tall and good-looking.)  It's not so unthinkable that they should be pulled toward each other.  Perhaps most significantly, they were both lonely and thirsting for love.  And they were both meditative and contemplative [not sure exactly of the line between meditation and contemplation]; they were both thinkers, though on different planes.  Interestingly, Ames made a point of NOT thinking about issues that were troubling to his religious faith, issues like hellfire and damnation, why Christ's 'saving message' comes to some and not to others, etc.  Lila chews on those troubling questions, using them as a reason NOT to get sucked into the 'pie in the sky bye and bye' preached by preachers to get fools to give them money.  

The novels are all philosophical and theological with not a whole lot of plot in terms of action, but a whole lot of cerebration and emotion.  Deus absconditus, Deus reconditus stuff.

How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened. But if it did matter, how could the world go on the way it did when there were so many people living the same and worse? Poor was nothing, tired and hungry were nothing. But people only trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them. No matter how proud and hard they were, the wind making their faces run with tears. That was existence, and why didn’t it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so much of existence is all that bitterness and fear? Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.

The Murdeers at the White House Farm.  We watch this docudrama on HBOMax last night and tonnight.  It was the story of a mass murder of a family in Essex, England, by an adopted son in the family.  It reminded one, at least a bit,  of the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina.  Cold-blooded murdrs of family members, including 2 children.

4/18/23

 Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Tuesday, April 18, 1944

In bed at 9:05 but I couldn't sleep until 10:30, no vino, no cognac, but no sleep, up at 4, unable to sleep.  32℉, sunny day ahead, high of 51℉, wind WNW at 13 mph, gusts up to 25 mph,  sunrise at 6:04, sunset at 7:38, 13+33.

A painting of Herself I did some years ago

Geri's Birthday.  Today is Geri's 79th birthday, the day she leaves her 70s, her 8th decade, and begins her 80s, her 9th decade.  It displeases her when I remind her that each birthday marks the end of one year and the beginning of another, seeming to add a year onto one's age, but it is what it is.  She's another year and another decade older today, 

A few years back, I started keeping a list on my iPhone of 'what I love about Geri and it started with her laugh.  I was listening to her chatting on her phone with one of her friends and she was really enjoying whatever it was they were talking about and she was laughing, a wonderful, deep, exuberant laughter that was a pleasure to listen to, infectious inasmuch as just hearing it made me smile.  

Later I added "sharing her thoughts" and "sharing time" with me to the list, realizing how she has privileged me by that sharing.  I'm the only person in the world she shares so much of her life with.  I have often thanked her for agreeing to marry me.  It's a great and unique privilege married people confer on their partners, a privilege we too often lose sight of as we cope with the daily necessities and distractions of life.

Then I added her devotion to duty.  It sounds as if I were thinking of a soldier or a 'first responder' but in all of the roles she plays in her life, Geri has an innate sense of duty. 'Sense of duty' doesn't capture what I'm referring to.  As a child to her parents, as a parent to her children, as a life partner to me, as a sister to her brother Jim, and as a friend to her many friends, she is true, caring, trustworthy, attentive, solicitous.  The people in her life can count on her for help, for advice, for an open ear and a ready hand, to respect confidences, to pitch in when some pitching in is needed and to butt out when some butting out is needed.  When my twice-widowed father came to live with us, Geri became his best friend at a time in his life when he so badly needed a real friend.  When her older brother lost his wife and his children were spread out across the country, Geri encouraged him to move near us and she personally cared for him for several years.  We should all have these qualities but not all of us do and few have them as innately, as suffusely as Geri does.  This sense of duty carries into all her undertakings, e.g., as an employee, as a volunteer (ombudsman at a nursing home, child welfare investigator, poll worker) and even to our pets.  When our beloved cat Blanche needed to be hydrated by transfusion every day, Geri turned her ironing board into a gurney for her, hung the hydrating solution from a closet door, and served as her nurse.  And Lilly, . . . words fail me.

She is courageous.  She has faced some difficult challenges in her life and addressed all of them head on.  Where many, including me, would have faltered, backed off from a difficult challenge, she has put her shoulder to the wheel and addressed them.  She has guts, tough-mindedness, patience, and an admirable sense of self-respect and determination that lets her succeed at challenges that would defeat many of us.

My iPhone list is lot longer and includes stuff like leading the way when there is tough, unpleasant, nasty work to be done.  She is first to pick up the mop or shovel, not waiting for others, including me, to get at it. But my list is inevitably incomplete.  She is who she is in all her uniqueness.  She is special in large part because she doesn't treat herself as special, as better than or not as good as anyone around her.  But she is very special to me, and she's very special to her family and to her many friends who count themselves privileged to have her in our lives.

La plus jolie fleur du marché parisien

Two stars on the red carpet

Lila's proposal; Lila's wedding.  Lila, full of shame, full of doubt, full of a persistent desire to pull up stakes and move on to somewhere, anywhere but where she was.  What an unusual love sotry, betrothal,and wedding.  What an unusal character she is, primitive, living almost like a cavewoman in her shack outside Gidean.  She can read but not well.  She can write but not well.  She suggests Ames should marry her in response to his question how he can repay her for caring for the gravesites of his wife and daughter and he says "yes."  She doesn't trust him (or anybody, for that matter) and he isn't entirely sure of the wisdom of what they are doing.  And though she wants, for reasons hardly clear to herself, to be baptized, she seems about as close to a heathen as one can be.  Marilynne Robinson hasl painted quite a picture here, including this scene which reminds me so much of thoughts, of fears I had as a Catholic child growing up brainwashed about mortal sins, etermanl perdition for those who die not in the "state of sanctifying grace' and my parents and all the adult in my family who skipped mass every Sunday and failed to make their "Easter duty."

"Lila went along with him to Boughton’s house to drink iced tea on the porch and listen while they talked, and one afternoon as she listened she understood that Doll was not, as Boughton said, among the elect. Like most people who lived on earth, she did not believe and was not baptized. None of Doane’s people were among the elect, so far as she knew, except herself, if she could believe it." . . . [Once they reached home] "She said, “I just never thought about all them other people. Practically everybody I ever knew. Some of them been kind to me.” He said, “I’m so glad they were kind to you. I’m very grateful for that.” “But they never gave one thought to the Sabbath. You never heard such cussing and coveting. They stole sometimes, if they had to. I knew a woman who maybe killed somebody with a knife. She’s dead now, so I guess there’s nothing to be done about that.” She said, “Them women in St. Louis, I believe adultery is about the only thing they was ever up to."

 What a Reign of Terror we were raised in by those priests and nuns in what was essentially an Irish Catholic Church.  'Raised in the bosom of the Church,' how caught up I was in all the lies, the superstiions, the terrors.  In Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Iowa, Rev. Boughton was the fire and brimstone Calvinist, Rev. Ames the 'God is Love' Calvinist that Robinson believes in.

The Geek Squad.  I went up to Best Buy this morning, asceertained that we were indeed enrolled in the  Geek Squad program since Geri bought her built-in wall oven there a few months ago, and made arrangements for a home visit on Saturday to find out what the problem is with our wifi/printer situation.

Birthday dinner.  We're doingk what we do no more than once or twice a year, having expensive ribeye steaks to celebrate Geri's birthday, along with Steve Caymas cabernet sauvignon.  First dinner on the propane grill this year.  Then some more Perry Mason and perhaps Succession.