Sunday, May 14, 2023
In bed after 9:30, awake at 4:30 thinking of my upcoming 'double dip' at Zablocki, out of bed at 5:15. 49℉, high of 54℉, 40% chance of light rain expected later today, wind NE at 9 mph, 7 to 14 mph today with gusts up to 26 mph, sunrise at 5:29, sunset at 8:07, 14+38.
Mother's Day. David called Geri around 8:30 last night to invite her to brunch this morning.
LTMW at the first birds to arrive at the feeders, one goldfinch on the niger tube, another on the sunflower tube at 5:55. The is also a chickadee hanging onto the bottom of the suet cake holder loaded with lint and tiny twigs for nesting. She's working diligently to fill her little beak with damp lint. By 7:35, a male cardinal landed on the orange hemisphere and enjoyed some breakfast. A few minutes later, an oriole appears, and then a downy woodpecker and what appears to be a purple finch, though my eyesight isn't sharp enough to distinguish red/house finches and purple finches. The squirrels are ever-present and ever-hungry.
Sarah and Andy prepared Mothers Day scrambled eggs on the living room carpet. On a happier note, I'm recalling on this Mothers Day another Mothers Day almost 50 years ago when we were living on Newberry Boulevard. I woke up and got out of bed that day and went downstairs to discover Sarah then perhaps 5 years old and Andy then maybe 3 on the living room carpet with a flat dinner plate between them filled with raw eggs. When I gasped 'what are you doing?' they informed me that they were making scrambled eggs to serve to their mother that Mother's Day morning. My memory of what occurred after that very reasonable and prescious explanation of why they had the plate full of raw eggs on the living room carpet is not very clear but I think I went back upstairs to wake up Anne so she could share that wonderful experience which has stayed with me (and I'm sure with her) for almost half a century. We thanked the children for their thoughtfulness and one of us managed to pick up the plate of slithery whites and yolks and get it into the kitchen.
Some memories of my mother from the memoir. We are 2 months shy of July 15 which will mark the 50th anniversary of my mother's death. The memoir was originally in the form of letters to my children.
"I haven’t written much about her until this letter for a number of reasons. First, revisiting memories of her is painful, for reasons which will become clearer later. Second, I left home within days of my 18th birthday to go to Milwaukee, be sworn into the Navy Reserve, and to attend Marquette. My college summers were spent on active duty with the Navy or Marines. I married immediately upon graduation and went off to serve 4 years of active duty in the Marines. Your mother and I returned to Milwaukee after I was discharged in 1967 and we did not visit my family frequently. My mother died 5 years after I was discharged so for the last thirteen years of her life and the first thirteen years of my adult life, we were living in different cities and I was not in frequent contact with her. As a consequence, my most vivid (though fading) memories of her are from my childhood and adolescence. I am remorseful that my relationship with my mother during those years was not nearly as close as Kitty’s. I have lived with this remorse in my heart for 35 years. It is one of the two great sorrows in my life. Third, it is impossible to get an understanding of my mother’s qualities without some knowledge of the tremendous challenges she encountered in her life, i.e., the subjects of the last several letters.
My mother’s early life reads like a melodrama. Born to poor immigrant parents, she was motherless by age 5, and 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, and 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. . . . 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. . . 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 my mother 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 practiced 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 my mother 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 war-haunted self.
Ironically, I believe your grandmother was the happiest person in our family. It is clear to me as I look backward that my paternal grandparents and Grandpa Dennis were unhappy people. My poor Aunt Monica was terribly burdened and not a happy person. Uncles Jim and Bud were heavy drinkers, as was Bim until Aunt Marie straightened him out. Kitty and I were also unhappy because of what we lived with. My mother hated my father’s drinking and withdrawal (and wasn’t averse to letting him know about it) but she was grateful for what she had. She had ‘the attitude of gratitude,’ a sure mark of a basically happy person. She was most grateful for her children and she let us know how much she loved us and how much we meant to her. She rejoiced in us.
Her not wallowing in self-pity, her not worrying about what she didn’t have, and her seeing positives in what were to most observers totally bleak situations are as much proof as I need of her saintliness. She had Faith, Hope, and Charity, not just as the so-called theological virtues, but as practical day-to-day living virtues. . . She never lost sight of the fact that there is more to life than the troubles of the moment.
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 the obstacles and all 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, and 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. Attitudes 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.
A photo of my wonderful mother during her waitressing days in the 1950s
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I blanch a bit reading at age 81 those words I wrote at age 65 or so. I engaged in some hyperbole by concentrating on my mother's happiness while largely ignoring the deep sorrows, worries, and distress she surely endured during her life, but the gist of my description of her was accurate. She never 'let the bastards get [her] down.' She derived much satisfaction from being alive, a lot of it from her relationship with Kitty and me, but also from so many others. She really was a remarkable human being and Kitty and I knew it as we were growing up and never forgot it. In the years before Kitty died, we grew wistful in talking about her in our old age. But my blanching is not from the incompleteness of the narration about my mother but rather is from the fact that I have become so unlike her in my old age, a Mickey the Mope, to use her term - a complainer, a sniveller, a cynic, an indulger in self-pity parties. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, et vobis fratres [et sorores], quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I should keep those words in mind from my altar boy days serving at innumerable Latin masses every time I'm thinking, writing, or about to write more snivellling comments about how bad the world has become. (Is this possible?) and also the words from the Act of Contrition I recited on the all too few occasions when I went to Confession: Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee. I detest my sins because of thy just punishment, but most of all because they offend thee, my Lord, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen. So many memories, so many sins, so few real 'firmly resolve's . . . You can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy. I need to remember the wisdom in Dennis Prager's tome:
We owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be. This does not mean acting unreal, and it certainly does not mean refraining from honest and intimate expressions of our feelings to those closest to us. But it does mean that we owe it to others to work on our happiness. We do not enjoy being around others who are usually unhappy. Those who enter our lives feel the same way. Ask a child what it was like to grow up with an unhappy parent, or ask parents what pain they suffer if they have an unhappy child (of any age). There is a second reason why happiness is a moral obligation. In general, people act more decently when they are happy. The chapter on seeking goodness explains the connection between goodness and happiness at length. It will suffice here to answer this: Do you feel more positively disposed toward other people and do you want to treat other people better when you are happy or when you are unhappy?” ― Dennis Prager, Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual
"Ken" is my fascist doppelganger, the guy who in the 2016 presidential election regularly received fundraising text messages for fascist political candidates, mainly Orange Julius. He came to life again yesterday with a message from DJT himself identifying himself as "President Donald J. Trump," not former president, and asking me to "please read my secure & private note on the NEW special counsel report: red23.co/3JeAQl" The end of the text says 'stop=end' but I'm afraid to reply 'stop' for fear of triggering some worse digital nastiness. On the other hand, based on my experience as "Ken" in 2016 (and 2020), I'll be receiving hundreds of these messages between now and November 2024.
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