Wednesday, November 22, 2023
In bed at 9:30, up at 5:50, let Lilly out. 36°, mostly/partly cloudy morning ahead, then sunny, wind NW at 10 mph, 8-14/28. Sunrise at 6:53 at 117°, sunset at 4:22 at 243°, 9+29. Solar noon at 11:37, altitude 27°.
Treadmill; pain. Awoke w/o pain, 🙏🤞 Alas, pain resumed while typing today's journal making me wonder whether sitting is a trigger in which case I'm in trouble. I looked at standing/kneeling/ ergonomic angle chairs on the internet. Hardly an easy adjustment. Day 2 of Advil: 0700, 1400, & 2100. CPP continued into the evening. 00:00/0.00
VA Yoga. I was unable to connect with either my computer downstairs or this one. I took advantage of the missed connection to lie down and take pressure off my tailbone. I need to find a good stretching DVD. . . . Not necessary: YouTube has many stretching & strengthening videos. I'll drop the yoga and try to get disciplined with 'Sit and Be Fit' and workouts and chair exercises for seniors in my 'sanctuary.'
GAC's not well. Her bronchitis worsened. Thankfully she has been able to sleep a lot, a blessing. 100° fever. Thanksgiving??? Feeling better by the afternoon and busy making pies by 4:30. It's uncertain whether she will be able to partake in the big dinner tomorrow and whether Steve and Nikki will be staying with us tomorrow night.
Around 2 o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, November 22nd, I was sitting with my class on some risers out in the woods waiting for a class of some sort to begin. An officer drove up in a Jeep and spoke to the instructor and then to us. President Kennedy had been shot to death in Dallas.What happened next? Were we dismissed? Was the base secured? Did we continue with the instruction? Was there any discussion of what the assassination might mean for the military? I have no memory of it. I was so stunned that I think my mind dropped into low gear. The enormity of the crime was too much to absorb. Anne and I spent that night and all day Saturday watching the news. I don’t remember this; I am assuming that we had a television. In any event, we were at least listening to the news and learned that the assassin was a former Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy’s body was returned to Washington and lay in repose in the East Room of the White House until Sunday when it was moved to the Capitol rotunda for public viewing.
On Sunday morning, Anne and I drove the short trip up US 1 to Washington. I wore my uniform. With thousands of others, we stood on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill. As we waited for the cortege, someone in the crowd with a portable radio announced that Oswald had been shot and killed while in police custody in Dallas. Shortly thereafter the vanguard of the cortege passed and we could hear the approaching muffled drums and nothing else. All were silent, solemn. The shock and pain of the assassination and the knowledge that the assassin was a former Marine was now compounded by the almost unbelievable news of Oswald’s death in police custody. The muffled drums drew closer and louder, the caisson carrying the President’s body came into view and passed, as did the riderless horse behind it. I saluted as the body passed and then we went home, wondering what was happening to the country.
I'm still wondering. Sarah posted Dan Rather's reflection on the Thanksgiving tradition on FB today. I thought it was appropriately grim, with comments like "There is no denying that we’ve had another year filled with tumult, uncertainty, pain, and suffering. As 2023 winds down and we look to the year ahead, there is little indication that these troublesome and dangerous trends will abate. If anything, they will likely intensify . . . ' and " . . . we are a divided nation. We are angry, distrustful, and disoriented." My comment:
I am not entirely sure whether this message is intended to be spirit-raising or a forewarning of dark days ahead. As I read it, I thought that my life began with Franklin Roosevelt as president and the nation fighting fascism abroad and may well end with Donald Trump as president and the nation succumbing to fascism at home. And whether we go one way or the other seems to be almost as much a matter of chance as a matter of choice, with Trump's opponent being an unpopular octogenarian. While November symbolically represents the anniversary of the first mythologized Thanksgiving, it also marks the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch and Kristallnacht. Where are we? Where are we going?
I wanted to end it with Ubi sumus? Quo veneris? just to get a little more mileage out of my 4 years of Latin with our beloved Brother Birmingham, or "Birmo" at Leo High School, but I realized it would be mighty pedantic and unwelcome to any reader. What I was thinking of as I wrote it though was that I had lived through the greatest days, at least in terms of wealth, military might, world respect, and hegemony, to the present days of "tumult, uncertainty, pain, and suffering" in which as a nation, a people, we are "angry, distrustful, and disoriented." Barack Obama and many other politicians are wont to say "This is not who we are," but we know now that this is indeed precisely who we are. We are a people who tolerate minority rule and purport to revere as "sacred" a Constitution that was crafted by oligarchs to prefer it. We are a people who have grown and prospered by White Supremacy, subjecting non-Whites, especially Blacks and native peoples, to oppression for centuries. Now we know that about half of us, mostly the older half, consider the minority rule and domination of minorities to be 'the good old days,' the days when America was 'great" as in "Make America Great Again."
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