8/7/23

 Monday, August 7, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 6:15 after a rough night, last part in BRR.  65℉, high of 76℉, cloudy, Beach Hazards Alert, 4-foot waves, dangerous currents.  AQI=40.  The wind is NNE at 12 mph, 3-13/21. DPs 57-62.   Sunrise was at 5:49, sunset at 8:05, 14+17.

Another night on the BR recliner.  Back, plumbing.

Jury duty.   I dropped Geri off at the Courthouse for her 'reserve juror' duty & picked her up at 5:30.  Not called for any voir dire.

Family mysteries.  There is a lengthy essay in today The Atlantic titled "The Ones We Sent Away" by Jennifer Senior.  It's about family members who are disabled in one way or another and are sent away, or institutionalized.  It reminds me of childhood fiends of my parents, Al and Ducky Hawes, who had two developlmentally-disabled children, or as they were called then, retarded.  I can't remember the kids' names now, 70 years or so later, but I remember playing with them when we would visit.  That is to say, they were not institutionalized, at least during the years when we would visit.  And I remember my Uncle Jim, who became schizophrenic sometime after his father, my 'Boppa Denny,' died.  He was the oldest of the Healy children, born Cornelius James, in Chicago on January 25, 1918, according to his Navy discharge papers, 13 months before his brother Donald, called "Bud", who followed on March 6, 1919, and four years before my mother, born on April 15, 1922.  The last sibling, Brendon, called "Bim" was born in Chicago on November 22, 1923.  Five years later, on September 1, 1928, their mother, Catherine O'Shea Healy, died of pernicious anemia.  Uncle Bud was born in Taconite, MN, and my mother in Grand Rapids, MN.  Taconite is a suburb of Grand Rapids, a hamlet at most, and Bud's birth there indicates a home birth, unlike my mother's which occurred in the Grand Rapids hospital, where Judy Garlland was born 2 months after my mother.  

The Healy children, except for Uncle Jim, grew up without a mother in their lives.  Jim was going on 11 years old when Catherine died.  Jim was the only Healy child who never married.  He served in the Navy during World War II and after his discharge often lived with or near his father and often engaged in common laborers work, bricklaying and hod carrying, as his father did.  

My mother's family were blue collar.  Bud had some kind of patronage job in Chicago and Bim was a mailman.  My mother waited on tables for years before landing a job at the Kool-Aid factory on Chicago's southwest side.

Uncle Jim disappeared after his father's death in 1952.  As best I can recall he had been acting strangely at the wake and funeral, but in any event he simply dropped out of sight after the funeral and burial.  Then some years later, my mother received a letter from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., notifying her that her brother James had been picked up on a park bench by the Washington police and taken to the hospital, a psychiatric facility, in need of care.  My mother was given as next-of-kin.  James was eventually transferred to the state mental hospital in Elgin Illinois to be closer to his family and I remember driving with my mother to visit him there, a seemingly endless drive in those pre-freeway days.  He was delusional, soft-spoken, and gentle.  He thought he was engaged to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was a ballerina.  He was subsequently transferred to a group home in Kenosha; it was a period of 'deinstitutionalization' when civil rights advocates for patients committed to mental hospitals were demanding their release and state authorities were only too happy to discharge thousands of patients whose care was a drain on state budgets.  I remember Uncle Jim coming from the group home to visit us on various occasions.  The visits were not unpleasant, quite the contrary, but there was some probably unavoidable aukwardness at times because of his delusion.  

I'm remembering Uncle Jim now, after reading the article in The Atlantic, with some regret, recalling how it was he who did the kinds of things with me and for me that normally a father would have done with a son growing up.  It was he who bought me my first bicycle and taught me to ride it, who bought me my first baseball 'mitt' and taught me how to shape its 'pocket', and who played catch with me.  It was he who gave me my first driving lessons, in a panel truck with 'stick shift' that he drove for an exterminating job he had.  It was he who took me and Kitty and our cousins to Riverview Amusement Park on Western Avenue and to White Sox games at Comisky Field and to the Brookfield Zoo.  For many years following his discharge from the Marines my father was 'out of commission,' suffering from PTSD post-Iwo Jima, and withdrawn from his children.  Uncle Jim liked me and loved me, I was important to him, dear to him, feelings I never got from my father.   I can't remember now when Uncle Jim died and whether I even knew that he died.  It may have been after my mother's death at age 51, when Jim would have been only 55 himself.  I recall all these memories of Uncle Jim before he got sick and realize how much I owe him and how little I did for him once he got sick, how consumed I was with my own life and challenges and how little I thought about him.  I suppose it wasn't all that unusual for a young guy just starting to make his way in the world but I wish I had it to do over and wonder if I would be mensch enough to act differently.

Uncle Jim with Kitty after the War

James with cousin Christine Cummings, Grandpa and Grandma Clausen, during a family visit while living in the group home in Kenosha.  

Female Finch behavior.  Many visits from pairs and solo house finches today.  The oranges I put out yesterday are popular with them as usual.  The females seem to be doing a courthship dance trying to seduce the males, a lot of feather fluttering, behavior I would think is more appropriate to the males of the species.   I think it is well past their nesting and egg-laying season but maybe I'm wrong.  In any event, the males seem more interested in the oranges than in the amorous (?) females.