6/14/24

Friday, June 14, 2024

 1940 Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp opened

1942 Anne Frank begins writing her diary two days after her 13th birthday

1946, Donald Trump was born

Although Parabola Lady reminds me of a Fernando Botero dumpling, she turned out to be not entirely worthless, not a paintover and reuse the canvas.  As usual with my portraits, she looks cartoonish but that's OK too, considering this was a salvage job from the beginning, and what's wrong with cartoons?  I enjoyed 'busying up' her robe.'

Rough night, insomnia.  In bed by 10 with a bad back and dry mouth.  I moved to LZB at 11 but didn't sleep and Lilly got me up with heavy breathing at midnight.  I let her out and ate a muffin, hoping it would help me sleep, but no such luck.  I let her out again at 2:30, again with heavy breathing, panting, worrying me about her health in her 15th year.  Around 3 or 3:30 (?), I nodded off while watching Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro, waking up again at 4:30 to take my prednisone with a muffin, with the first light appearing before the 5:11 dawn.  I nodded off again until 6:20 when I let Lilly out for the 3rd time.

Prednisone, day 33, 20 mg. day 11.   I took my 2 10 mg. pills at 4:35 with a berry muffin.  Three days left on the 20 mg. dosage, then down to 15 mg. on Tuesday, half of the maximum 30 mg. I took between 5/24/ and 6/3, 11 days.

  

Anniversaries.  First, Anne Frank.  I'm a little ashamed that I have never read her diary.  I've long been knowledgeable about the plight of her and her family, but I've never read the diary itself.  Has it been because she was a teenage girl and I foolishly thought I wouldn't be interested in her young life?  I don't know.  Was it because I knew how the story ended and it was too depressing?  I know that my heart aches every time I see the photograph of her with her beautiful smile and bright intelligent eyes.  Many years ago, Andy played Anne's companion and boyfriend Peter van Pels in a play at Shorewood High School.  On our one night in Amsterdam returning from Italy, Geri and I managed to find the building she had hidden in with her family, the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer.  The building/museum was closed for the night and all we could do was look at it and the street it is on, and the Dutch Reformed Church on the corner, thinking about what had happened there on August 4,1944.  I had a need to touch the building, to place my palm on its bricks, which seemed sacred.  I thought a lot about the Reformed church down the street and imagined the Nazi troops with their captives driving past it.  I wondered whether the church bells rang during the Occupation so Anne could hear them, or were they silent?  Perhaps Anne's diary would tell me.

    At last, I have started to read the diary, online, at 1 a.m.  Better late than never.   The first thing that strikes me is what "prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don’t have a friend. . . Let me put it more clearly since no one will believe that a thirteen-year-old girl is completely alone in the world. And I’m not. I have loving parents and a sixteen-year-old sister, and there are about thirty people I can call friends. I have a family, loving aunts, and a good home. No, on the surface I seem to have everything, except my one true friend. All I think about when I’m with friends is having a good time. I can’t bring myself to talk about anything but ordinary everyday things. We don’t seem to be able to get any closer, and that’s the problem. Maybe it’s my fault that we don’t confide in each other."  I have explored several times in this journal the question of why I do it, and why I keep writing when it's almost a certainty that no one will ever read any of it, either the hard copy I print and keep on a rising pile on my desk downstairs, or the online blog.  The one reason I have not considered is the first and only one Anne mentions: the lack of a friend to confide in.  When my sister died, I lost my closest friend and confidante (other than Geri).  I used to share some confidences with TSJ and with DSB but they have both died, as has my friend Father Matthew at the HOP.  I still have long-term friends EGFIII and LOA but they are 1400 and 800 miles distant, respectively.  I've had good friendships that I have let slip away, Ara Cherchian, Vicky Conte, Janine Geske, Larry Stack, Don Shane, and others so I end up like Anne Frank, without "my one true friend . . . to confide in."  Geri, thank goodness, is my best friend and confidante, but we have shared so much of daily life, Anne Frank's 'ordinary, everyday things', for going on 40 years that there is much that is unsaid.  I think of Tevye and Golde in Fiddler ('Do you love me?') and Emily in Our Town ('Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. . . Let’s look at one another.')  Anne Frank made up her 'one true friend', her diary, and named the friend 'Kitty,' the name of my beloved sister and best friend.  So here I am at 2 in the morning, writing in my journal, my "Kitty," wondering whether eating another muffin might help me to nod off and get some sleep before my big day getting a continuous glucose monitor mounted on my arm at the VA.  Time to light a candle.

Second, Auschwitz is where Anne and her family were sent after their discovery and seizure.  She was later sent to the Bergin-Belsen concentration camp where she died, probably of typhus.  I remember when I first learned of the extermination camps and the Holocaust as a preteen, a loss of whatever innocence I had by that time in my life.  I need to stop thinking of such matters now.

Third, it was a dark day when Trump was born.  I was going on 5 years old on that day, I a prewar baby, and he a baby boomer.  My mother, my sister, and I were living with my badly damaged father, never able to get Iwo Jima out of his thoughts.  Trump would grow up to think of him as a "loser" and a 'sucker" for having served in the Marines.  Trump himself would avoid Vietnam service based on 'bone spurs' on his heels, a problem that never seemed to handicap him once the war and the draft were over.  This was perhaps not surprising since the two daughters of the podiatrist who diagnosed the 'bone spurs' did so as a favor to his landlord, Fred Trump, Donald's father.  In America, no one is above the law, right?  Har de har har.

FreeStyle Libre 3 CGM,  I visited with Jill Hansen this afternoon to get educated and equipped with a FreeStyle Libre 3 continuous glucose monitor.  Much of the way home the app on my iPhone kept signaling me with a High Glucose Alert, 389 Critical,  When I got home I did a fingerstick which reported 351,  What have I gotten myself into???  Once I got home, the libre count kept going down, giving me hope I wouldn't be constantly troubled by high glucose alarms.