6/5/23

 Monday, June 5, 2023

In bed at 10:35, awake at 4:56, up at 5:16 unable to sleep, let Lilly in.  54℉, expected high of 76℉, cloudy morning & sunny afternoon, N wind at 4 mph, gusts up to 11 mph, sunrose at 5:13, sunset at 8:27, 15+14.

Why did I do it?!?  What was I thinking when I decided to look inside the several sealed storage boxes in the basement?  The contents of those boxes hold the records of my life, from birth on.  Even before birth - actual wedding photos from August 3, 1940, when my Mom and Dad got married at St. Bernard's Church in Englewood on Chicago's South Side.  Their marriage certificate attested to by Father Thomas Kelly. The 'baby book' given to my mother at Englewood Hospital at 60th and Green Streets in Englewood, signed and notated by the nurses who attended her and me during the 10 days she and I spent in the hospital during and after my birth, typical in those days.  Baby pictures of my sister Kitty and me, First Holy Communion photos, Confirmation photos of cousin Christine and me, junior prom photo with my first big crush and first chaste kiss, the pretty Irish colleen Maureen Boyle from Mercy High School, senior prom photos with the first Love of my Life Charlene Wegge.  

Maureen Boyle, Leo junior prom

 Photo of Anne and me, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the Navy Ball in 1963, Sarah's 1987 Shorewood High School graduation brochure and my 1959 Leo High School graduation brochure. 

Navy Ball, Wisconsin Club, 1963

 Andy's MVP certificate from his Little League days on the Pirates.  All the notes and research materials I gathered during the many months I worked on the memoir.  My father's military records including his DD214 and Honorable Discharges. Photos of him and friends  His medical and Medicare records from when he lived with Geri and me.  

My Dad, upper right, probably at or near Camp Pendleton, CA 1944

Professional photographs and snapshots - hundreds and hundreds of them.  So many memories, some happy, some not, so many pangs.  Some of these treasures are mildewed but most are not.  What do I do with all this stuff?  Put it back in fresh boxes that aren't mildewed and waterlogged?  Approaching my mid-80s, I'm on my last legs.  This stuff will mean little to nothing to anyone other than me.  What's the point of saving it for Geri or one or more of the kids to throw away?  What should I just throw away?  How much of it am I emotionally able to just toss in a garbage bag?  Every time I sit down and look at the stuff spread out on my big butcherblock office desk or my painting work table I start remembering this, that, or the other thing from my life, feel some emotions, and get semi-paralyzed.  I suppose I'll re-box the stuff, sorted somehow, and let the kids trash it or not.

Elegy was our first movie of the night.  Ben Kingsley = slimy old professor of literature who seeks out beautiful young female students to sleep with.  Penelope Cruz = target student.  Patricia Clarkson = Kingsley longterm mistress.  Dennis Hopper = Kingley's longterm buddy.  Kingsley is a selfish, cheating cad who diligently pursues no-strings-attached sex with pretty co-eds.  Cruz (unbelievably) falls in love with him but he disappoints her in enough ways that she dumps him causing him to realize, post-dump, that he loved her too.  Two years after the dump, she (unbelievably) has to tell him that she has breast cancer and will be losing her incredibly beautiful breast(s) to a surgeon's knife so Kingsley should take an artistic photograph of them pre-surgery.  After decades of thinging only of himself, he visits Cruz in the hospital post-mastectomy and tells her he'll be there for her, beatiful breasts or no beautiful breasts.  My thoughts on watching the movie: (1) thoughts of Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock", and (2) a variation on the theme of Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."   The movie is an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel "The Dying Animal" which I will try to pick up at the Whitefish Bay library today.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger was our second movie of the night.  I can't help it - I like Woody Allen movies (except for Manhattan and its creepy plot of a 42 year old weirdo dating a 17 year old weirdo, and even there, despite the dirty old man sex abuse theme, I love the background music. and New York scenery shots).  Just about everybody in this movie is frustrated and unhappy, 'looking for love in all the wrong places.'  Their misbegotten quests for love and reinforcement of their own senses of worthiness end badly except for Gemma Jones' mother character, Helena, who believes her fortune teller who tells her of her former lives as Cleopatra or Joan of Arc perhaps and predicts that she will meet her true love (the tall dark stranger) who turns out to be Jonathan, a half-bald, portly, Dickensian frump who owns an occult bookstore.  Jonathan and Helena, who believe in fantasies, find happiness in life.  The realists (Helena's daughter and son-in-law and former husband) find only failure and disappointment.  Was Woody Allen reflecting on his own life and the lives of religious and perhaps other True Believers?  Is he opining that we need myth, fantasy, wishful-thinking, make-believe to live without bitterness, like Karl Marx's: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."  Or Freud's notions about religion and projection, wish-fulfullment, childish fantasy of a cosmic Father who relieves us of guilt and comforts us.

Barkis and Peggotty are the names of two minor characters in Dickens' David Copperfield, Barkis being a stagecoach driver and seeker of the hand in marriage of Clara Peggotty, David's loving childhood housekeeper/nanny.  Barkis was known for his catchphrase "Barkis is willin'" which was how he famously proposed marriage to Peggotty who accepted. In the 1980's I bought a pair of tropical green finches (who didn't survive long) and named them Barkis and Peggotty.  When Geri and I lived in the Knickerbocker, we had a pair of house finches who visited us and who we took to feeding on the windowsill of our kitchen window; I thought of them as another Barkis and Peggotty.  It has now become clear to me that we have at least one other Barkis and Peggotty couple visiting our birdfeeders and oranges.  They arrive together, feed together, and leave together and  very clearly are 'in a relationship.'  Often they perch on the same orange hemisphere and share the riches; sometimes one will work on one orange while the other works on the other, but always leaving together when the first one finishes.

VA pelvic floor therapy this morning.  The last?. . . . Yes.

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