3/4/24

 Monday, March 4, 2024

In bed around 9:30 after dozing on the BL, awake and up from bed at 3:44.   Let Lilly out.  46°, high of 57°, wind NNE at 6 mph, 5-16/29.  0.35" of rain is expected in the next 24 hours.  Sunrise at 6:21, sunset at 5:45, 11+23.  The longest daylight is 15+23 on June 29.  We have a way to go.

Treadmill; pain.  I woke up with no substantial pain in my right wrist and hand and with reduced pain in my left shoulder.  I spent the whole night in bed, rather than on the LZB or BL.  I wasn't able to do the PT yesterday because of pain and the shoulder is still quite painful this morning.  I keep my fingers crossed that I'll be able to do the PT stretches later but I'm getting pretty skeptical about everything involving these pains that have been with me now every day since last Christmas.  Getting a bit despondent.   On the other hand, I was able to do 2 sets of all the PT stretches without too much pain today, a sign of progress?

   A year ago today I blew out Kitty's Yahrzeit candle and noted that its flame was small and steady.  I reflected that it was like Kitty herself who went through life quietly and unobtrusively, never seeking attention for herself but spreading quiet goodness wherever she went.  Those who were quietly blessed by her goodness included many family members, including our aunt-by-marriage, Mary Horgan, widow of our Uncle Bud, who lived with and was cared for by Kitty for decades after Bud's death, her sister-in-law Jerry Reck, whom Kitty took into her home and cared for in the last years of Jerry's life, our father who lived with and was cared for by Kitty during the last few years of his life, Jim Reck's niece Mary, who suffered so much during her life and had a second home with Kitty during much of her last years, and of course me, her brother, of whom she unwaveringly thought so much, though I didn't deserve it.  But she didn't restrict sharing her goodness and love to family members.  She deprecated herself as "just the cleaning lady" for the many elderly families she served, but for all or almost all of them she became a trusted friend, for some almost a family member.  Their children who lived out of state had Kitty's cell phone number and would regularly call her to check on their parents.  Her elderly clients loved and trusted Kitty and so did their children, and for good reasons.   There were also all those people she helped over the years as a volunteer in the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the homeless people she helped feed at André House in downtown Phoenix, and all the children and parents she helped every year in her Christmas Adopt-a-Family program.  On my visits, I saw her on the telephone for hours with the giving and receiving folks in the Christmas program.  I accompanied her on food distribution circuits for SVDP and volunteered with her (and her daughter Chrissie) at André House.  She sought no credit for any of her good works.  She did them because they needed to be done and she could do them.  It was all "out of the goodness of her heart."  If ever there was a saint, one who lived the life called for in Matthew 25:31-46, it was St. Kitty. 

I'm grateful for candles. I blew out Kitty's Yahrzeit candle at 4:10 this morning but I have her in mind today, with thankfulness.  A few years ago, when Kitty's insomnia seemed worse than usual, I sent her a red votive candle holder and a box of votive candles.  I asked her to light a candle when she was up all alone in the middle of the night, sitting in their spare bedroom she called my bedroom, and let the candle remind you that your brother is with you.  Later I bought a red holder for myself and my own box of candles and I would light my candle before daybreak when I was up alone, usually texting with her.  I think of that as my "Kitty candle" and I always think of her when I see it or light it.  Candles are big in Catholic culture, including the Irish Catholic culture in which we grew up.  Catholic churches always had at least one wrought iron rack of votive lights in red holders somewhere in the church along with waxed wicks for lighting them and a depository for offerings.  "I'll light a candle for you" was a way of saying I'll be praying for you.  Lighting a candle was also a traditional way of praying for the 'dearly departed' or for praying for God's intercession in a time of danger or need.  I suppose those little candles burning in the sanctified space of the church long after the offering churchgoer was gone was a way of symbolizing the continuation of the precatory prayer after the offeror had left the church.

Whatever the symbolism, I always liked those rows of votive lights in the church and liked to light them for whatever reason.  When I was an altar boy in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade at St. Leo Grammar School one of my duties was to light the candles on the main alter before mass, one candle on each side of the tabernacle for a 'low mass,' 3 on either side for a 'high mass.'  There is, or perhaps now I should say 'was', a large body of regulatory church law on the number of candles to be used for low masses, high masses, solemn high masses, pontifical masses, 40-hour devotions, benedictions, and eucharistic adorations.  Those regulations are, or were, just a small part of the legalistic, spirit-killing, formalism that led and still leads so many people to reject traditional Catholicism.  They are part and parcel with customs and regulations that have priests wearing chasubles, albs, cinctures, and stoles, that have bishops wearing silly-looking miters and carrying croziers or shepherd's crooks, and wearing very expensive different colored vestments for different liturgical seasons  Many religionists eat that stuff up; others are repelled by it.  But as it is often said, you can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy.  I still 'light a candle' for my dear sister.

Haircut & beard trim day at Sport Clips with Hannah.

Zen and the Birds of Appetite,  I read some more of this Thomas Merton tome, specifically the chapter titled "A Christian Looks at Zen."  Much of it is heavy going, but some of it I think I understood.  I also watched a short YouTube clip on Kabat-Zinn on MBSR and pain and a longer program from the Google campus in California featuring Bob Stahl discussing mindfulness and medicine.  Stahl is an interesting guy with some good insights and an easy presentation style.