5/4/23

 Thursday, May 4, 2023

In bed at ?, up at 6:44, 42℉, high of 59℉, mostly sunny, soft wind at 4 mph, 2 to 13 mph today, gusts up to 23 mph.  The sun rose at 5:40, sets at 7:56,, 14+15.

Lilly has been having 'accidents,' peeing in her sleep, on the sofa we bought for her to be able to snuggle next to Geri, and also on her bed in Geri's bedroom.  We mourn at what this may mean. We know she has reached her life expectancy, and we dread losing her, an incredibly sad prospect. . . . . Geri took a urine sample to the vet's office this afternoon to be analyzed for a UTI. Result was no UTI so no antibiotics prescribed but rather another med to be given twice a day to reduce incontinence.

Also, I took the cushion covers for 'Lilly's sofa' up to Martinizing and was told I need to bring the covers in on the cushions because the dry cleaning will shrink the covers othwise.  Also I was told the cleaning will take 2 and 1/2 weeks!

More from the Rachel Cusk piece on Annie Ernaux & Delphine de Vigan.  "Among other things, what de Vigan — and the powerful response of her public — testified to was the personal cost exacted by life in this exalted, beautiful yet patriarchal nation. . . Her mother’s pain “was part of our childhood, and later of our lives as adults,” she writes. “Without doubt her pain formed us, my sister and me. Yet any attempt at explanation is bound to fail. Instead I must make do with a writing made of odds and ends, of fragments, of hypotheses.”  I had the same experience putting together the memoir of my life up to the time of my children's births.  I spent many, many months, and years at the project with genealogical and other research, and remembering what I could remember, but with my parents ending up with only bits of "odds and ends, of fragments, of hypotheses."  And mysteries about so much, my mother's early life growing up with no mother in a house full of males, of the time when she was left in Chicago when my grandfather and the boys moved to Texas, of life in the Great Depression, her decision to marry at 18, life before my father left for the war, whether he could have avoided the draft for his work in a war industry plant, whether she thought he abandoned her with me not yet 3 and Kitty on the way, whether and why she never wrote him, their life when he returned with PTSD, the rape, the notoriety, her relationship with my grandmother, the move to Luna Pier MI, and so much more.  As I think back now as an old man on our life in that basement apartment at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue when I was a little boy, I am overcome with an immense sadness.  And much as with my mother, the same is true with regard to my father, so much unknown, so many unknowns.  I had a chance to learn from my father simply because he was still alive and living with us for a few years, but he was not one to talk of anything unpleasant or painful.  "The less said, the better."  How often did I hear those words when I was growing up?  How often did Kitty and I in our morning conversations late in life discuss the many unknowns of our parents' lives in those years following the end of World War II?

24h Jerusalem.  I've been watching this series of half-hour segments on OVID.  It's very interesting, cutting back and forth from Jewish residents to Palestinian residents and Christian (Franciscan) residents..