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.
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.
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.
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