6/7/23

 Wednesday, June 7, 2023

In bed at 10, awake for a while around 4 but fell back to sleep and up at 5:18 with K. D. Lang's Big bones Gal and Trail of Broken Dreams in my muddled head.  53℉ with expected high of 66℉ under sunny skies, wind NNE at 11 mph, 8 to 15 mph today, gusts up to 26 mph.  The sun rose at 5:12 and will set at 8:29, 15+16.  

Midsummer approaches and the sun at sunrise is ENE at 57 degrees, far enough north to make me pull my recliner back to avoid the sunlight hitting me directly in the eyes as I read the papers, watch the birds, or type some thoughts into my Daily Drivel.  From the 17th through the 29th, the sunrise will be northernmost at 56 degrees before heading south again to 122 degrees in mid-December.  

Wisconsin Wildfire Worries.  Will we be replacing California as a big natural disaster site?  According to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor, there was a “huge expansion” of abnormal dryness over the last week from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic and into New England. Drought is expected to develop or worsen in these areas in June.  Some parts of the Midwest, such as Michigan, northeast Ohio and parts of Wisconsin, have had less than a quarter of their normal precipitation over the past 30 days, while nearly the entire region is under 75 percent of normal, according to Beth Hall, director of the Midwestern Regional Climate Center.  According to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor, there was a “huge expansion” of abnormal dryness over the last week from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic and into New England. Drought is expected to develop or worsen in these areas in June.  The nation’s northern tier, rather than California, has the highest fire risk, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.  The Great Lakes states are the primary area of concern for fire danger in June.  

Mike Pence, the Great Uniter, has announced he is running for president.  The Great Uniter? Nobody likes him, except, he thinks, God. "My family has been blessed beyond measure . . . That's why today, befoe God and my family,  I am announcing I am running for president of the United States.”  Is it possible for me to dislike anyone more than I loathe Trump?  Maybe Mike Pence.  Vanitas vanitatem  dixit Ecclesiastes et omnia vanitas.

From this morning's WaPo, an article by Kevin B. Blackistone with this opening: "How the 48th vice president of the United States — or, the “oleaginous Mike Pence,” as George Will once called him, “with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness” — graduated from Hanover College with a bachelor’s degree in history, history, is difficult to imagine, given a complaint he drafted to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred on Friday. For it is rife with so much ahistoric fantasy that it probably would have earned a failing grade from whoever chaired Hanover’s history department when Pence was there.  Such as, for example, the claim that Major League Baseball has an “apolitical reputation” and “once stood for American greatness” that transcended “political, social, and cultural boundaries.”  Blackistone goes on to demonstrate that Pence is just another gasbag.

My Mildewed Boxes and The Things by Donald Hall.

When I walk in my house I see pictures,

bought long ago, framed and hanging

—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—

that I've cherished and stared at for years,

yet my eyes keep returning to the masters 

of the trivial—a white stone perfectly round, 

tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell, 

a broken great-grandmother's rocker,

a dead dog's toy—valueless, unforgettable 

detritus that my children will throw away

as I did my mother's souvenirs of trips 

with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens, 

and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

Counting Backwards by Linda Pastan

How did I get so old,
I wonder,
contemplating
my 67th birthday.
Dyslexia smiles:
I’m 76 in fact.

There are places
where at 60 they start
counting backwards;
in Japan
they start again
from one.

But the numbers
hardly matter.
It’s the physics
of acceleration I mind,
the way time speeds up
as if it hasn’t guessed

the destination—
where look!
I see my mother
and father bearing a cake,
waiting for me
at the starting line. 

How I am blessed in old age by poetry including the poetry of old age.  I don't have the energy, concentration, or eyesight to read or reread novels and I struggle, usually unsuccessfully, to read heavy nonfiction tomes even on Kindle.  But good poems, the non-opaque ones that touch my heart or punch me in the stomach, stick with me, keep me company,   I'm thankful to the poets and to the college Lit professors who opened worlds to me, and to my parents whose Depression and War-schooled lives formed me, prepared me to be moved as Donald Hall was by 'a dead dog's toy - valueless' and Linda Pastan's perception of 'the physics of acceleration . . . the way time speeds up as if it hasn't guessed the destination.'  She must have known of Geri's and my references to 'our daily New Yorker'.   And I wonder whether Donald Hall, appreciator of his dead dog's toy, was familiar with John Updike's heartbreaking Dog's Death.  I think of our Lilly of course, so dear to us and now so aged, and of Blanche, who slept on my shoulder every night for years and kept me company for 17 years.  

Geri and her shadow

 

Each night Blanche would crawl under my blankets to sleep just like this

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.  Tom Friedman's comun in the NYT this morning is terrific.  I'll be thinking about it for a while, especially re the similarities and dissimilarites between Israel and the U.S., the roles of evangelicalism and orthodoxy, the power struggle between modern secularists and True Believers, the on-the-streets activism of both groups in Israel and comparative lack of it here (not to be overstated.)