Saturday, August 3, 2024
1940 Charles Edward Clausen, age 19, married Mary Norma Healy, age 18, at St. Bernard's Catholic Church at 65th and Harvard Avenue in the Englewood district of Chicago.
In bed around 9:15, awake around 4:30, and up and out at 4:50 with a very painful knee, thigh, and hip. Are these pains sharp or dull, throbbing, burning? They seem to be all of the descriptions. I can't lay the laptop on my right leg because of the pain. Four days until I see Dr. England and perhaps get some relief - perhaps. . . . Lilly has been sleeping on the floor in front of me, breathing so lightly I keep looking at her stomach to see whether she may have died overnight. Is she breathing at all? She is, and she wakes up at 5:30 to move into the living room without asking to be let outside. How long before she returns?
Prednisone, day 83, 15 mg., day 5/14. I took 15 mg. at 5 a.m. Breakfast of 2 cold chicken legs around 6a.m. I took 1300 mg. of Tylenol at 8 a.m.
84th Anniversary thoughts. From my memoir:
My father was slender and good-looking and took pride in his appearance. Each Sunday, he and his lifelong friend Al Braley put on their suits, spats, fedoras, and gloves (I’m not making this up; I have this information ‘from the horse’s mouth.’) to go to Mass at St. Bernard’s and then to hang out in front of a drugstore on Wentworth Avenue watching the girls stroll by, with my father hoping that one of them would be Mary Healy, by whom he was thoroughly smitten.
My parents married at St. Bernard’s Church on August 3, 1940. My mother was 18 and my father a month shy of his 20th birthday. They were practicing Catholics and they were virgins. They were not only virgins; my father had never “touched” my mother, a fact he shared with Geri during one of their long intimate conversations. If Charles and Mary were to embrace and physically love each other, according to the laws of the Church, they would have to be married and married they became, still teenagers, only a few years beyond childhood, unable to conceive of the challenges, the extraordinary hardships they were to experience in the years ahead of them. They married as German troops were sipping good French wine in recently occupied Paris, as the first Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were being sent to Auschwitz, and as Japan was occupying coastal cities in China and in French Indochina, now Vietnam. The threatening international picture isn’t reflected in their wedding photographs, and indeed they were oblivious to it, as my father confirmed in his 80s when I asked him about it. He didn’t say it but we know the truth: they wanted to fall asleep next to each other at night and to wake up next to each other in their mornings, to make love to each other when the Spirit moved, to face life together, to draw strength from each other, to be supported by the love of each other, all without facing the eternal hell fires threatened by the Church. And so they got married in their youth, their adolescence.
The wedding was formal, with my mother in a beautiful bridal gown and formal dresses on her bridesmaids and tuxedos for my father and his attendants. Where in the world did they get the money to fund the wedding? My father’s tuxedo was rented, I’m sure, and my mother’s dress, I’m sure, was borrowed. The wedding reception was in an apartment or a rented room, perhaps theirs for the term of the rental, They were married in any event by their favorite parish priest, Father William Cousins, who later become an illuminatus, Archbishop Cousins of Milwaukee, the eponym of “The Cousins Center,” soon to be sold to cover some of the costs of the sins of the Church that drove my parents, at such a young age, to marry, to commit themselves under pain of eternal damnation to staying together no matter what.
After the marriage, Chuck and Mary Clausen lived in very modest circumstances, i.e., a succession of furnished rooms with Murphy beds, which is to say, their home consisted of a single room with a fold-up bed built into one of the walls. They took a room on the north side of Chicago once, for reasons never explained to me by my Dad, but felt out of place there and quickly moved back to the South Side, in or near Englewood. When they ‘scouted out’ rooms to rent, my mother could tell as soon as she entered a room whether it was infested by bedbugs; they had a special smell and she was sensitive to it, undoubtedly from living with bedbugs during her young life. My mother’s sensitive nose, however, did not work with cockroaches, at least of the Oriental type, for the three small rooms at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue that we lived in for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life were always infested with those large black shiny cockroaches that cracked when we were rarely able to step on them and that we euphemistically called “water bugs.” We lived with them for years.
My mother was a beautiful woman, with milky white skin, dark and bright blue eyes, and long, thick, coarse dark hair. My father and my Aunt Monica have often referred to how beautiful she was and my childhood memories of her confirm their judgment. When she would come to school to visit the nuns, my classmates remarked to me how pretty my mother was.
Emily Dickinson:
Pain — has an Element of Blank — / It cannot recollect
When it begun — or if there were / A time when it was not —
It has no Future — but itself — / Its Infinite realms contain
Its Past — enlightened to perceive / New Periods — of Pain.
. . . . . .
I've started my third year of maintaining this daily journal so I am not so oblivious of the start and stopping of pain as Miss Dickinson was. I know, for example, that the hip pain that may have developed a concurrent sciatica pain started on July 12th of this year. I made a note of it in my journal. I know I woke up with it. I know that it didn't start with an injury. I know too when I first noted what eventually was diagnosed as polymyalgia rheumatica, i.e., the bilateral pains in my shoulders, wrists, hands, and hips (?). It was on Christmas morning, 2023. Again, I woke up with it and made a note of it. I don't know when my various bouts of chronic pelvic started during the last maybe 15 years or so, but I know when they ended, i.e., after surgery on my bladder cauterizing the painful ulcers. Most recently that was on March 5th of this year. Before that, it was after the traumatic 3rd fulguration at the Rawson Avenue Surgery Center. What I don't know is whether, how, and when I may expect the current disabling chronic pain to end. The call from Dr. Cheng yesterday afternoon was very welcome but not at all reassuring. He tells me it sounds like my leg and knee pain are probably sciatica and that it is most commonly treated with psychotropic chemicals, i.e., either gabapentin or Cymbalta. Both those drugs have very nasty side effects, including drowsiness (zombification) and insomnia along with several others, all bad. I'm reluctant to take either one. I watched some YouTube videos on sciatica pain relief from stretches and I wondered how I can do the stretches when I am unable to stand for more than a couple of minutes. Plus it looks like I may be in for some more physical therapy sessions at the VA. The outpatient PT Clinic in the basement of the VA seems like my second home. I love the therapists but I've developed a resistance to more PT, so I am resisting taking the usual medications and resisting taking advantage of what is surely expert PT treatment and advice. Not a good situation. Shape up or ship out, Bozo.
On the other hand, today is the 23rd consecutive day of serious pain and inability to be on my feet for more than a couple of minutes, 23 days of using my rollator to move between recliner and bathroom, between recliner and kitchen, between recliner and front day to let Lilly in and out. I'm weary, worn out, or as David Bedbill wrote in his Poem About Pain
I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing
from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you're in
is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything
but your own pain, the rest of the world, and all other life
don't matter.
I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and
how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,
their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous
I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.
. . .
Pain is selfish, almost narcissistic. It pays attention only to itself. it demands attention. Indeed its whole raison d'etre is to bring attention to itself, shouting "Something is wrong. Pay attention to me and fix me or get me fixed!" But fixing it isn't so easy. It may require introducing noxious chemicals into your body, undergoing surgery, waiting many days or weeks to see one of the too few doctors in our capitalist medical system, or simply waiting and hoping for it to go away, as most pains do (if we're lucky.) But some pains are unlucky; they signal that "Time's up!", like an exam monitor at some qualifying and competitive examination. "Pencils down!" I'm reminded of taking the NROTC scholarship test -where?- in 1958 or 1959, and of taking the LSAT at Villanova in 1967, getting lost trying to find the place, frantically arriving on time. For the NROTC exam, I was first fingerprinted. Did I have to identify myself somehow for the LSAT? In any case, pain asks for no ID before settling in its visit. The visited one is The Chosen One. Why me Lord? Why not you, fella?
Is Israel our tar baby? If so, why? Is Israel just a way for the American government to support its war industry, the military-industrial complex? Both Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austen have said, probably truthfully, that the United States government had no foreknowledge of and no participation in the assassination of the Hezbollah commander in Beirut or the assassination of the Hamas leader in Teheran. Those assassinations, each surely a violation of international law, have led to a promise of dire retaliation from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Why is it that almost the first words out of Biden's, Blinken's, and Austin's mouths is that the U.S. will defend Israel from the consequences of its illegal acts? Suppose the American government has no foreknowledge, control over, influence on, or participation in the actions of the Israeli government under Bibi Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich. Why are our sailors and Marines standing by in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Oman ready to engage Iranian forces retaliating against Israel in their never-ending game of tit-for-tat? With a friend like Israel, who needs enemies? Why are America's sons and daughters risking their lives for Israel?
The United States government has expended an extraordinary treasure and political/diplomatic capital on Israel for years. Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance. The United States has also provided large foreign aid packages to other Middle Eastern countries, particularly Egypt and Iraq, but Israel stands apart. Egypt is the second largest recipient of US aid, and that is only as an inducement for its peace treaty with Israel in 1979 as part of the 1978 Camp David Accords. From the Camp David peace accords in 1978 until 2000, the United States has subsidized Egypt's armed forces with over $ppp38 billion worth of aid. Egypt receives about $1.3 billion annually. This is an expenditure by the US that is, as near as I can tell, simply a continuing cost of supporting peace with Israel.
Most of the aid to Israel —approximately $3.3 billion a year—is provided as grants under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, funds that Israel must use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.
Transfers of U.S. military equipment to Israel, as to other foreign governments, are subject to relevant U.S. law. The United States cannot provide security assistance to foreign governments or groups that commit gross human rights violations, a red line enshrined in the so-called Leahy Law. Moreover, the Biden administration announced in February 2023 that it would not provide arms to recipients deemed likely to commit serious human rights violations. Some legal scholars and other critics have alleged that the United States has not applied the Leahy Law with regard to Israel as it has with other Middle Eastern countries. Indeed, the Ronald Reagan administration banned transfers of cluster munitions to Israel for several years in the 1980s after it determined that Israel had used them on civilian targets during its invasion of Lebanon. In May of this year, the Biden administration issued a report that found it “reasonable to assess” that Israel has used U.S. weapons since October 7 “in instances inconsistent with its IHL [International Humanitarian Law] obligations.” Days later, the White House said it was pausing a shipment of large bombs to Israel ahead of a pending assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, although it noted it would continue other military assistance. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which [Israel goes] after population centers,” President Biden said in an interview with CNN. Biden has also criticized Israel's "indiscriminate bombing." The International Court of Justice has found it is "plausible" that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for "war crimes" in Gaza. Yet the supply of arms to Israel from US military contractors goes on undiminished. Why? Because the military-industrial complex controls the government, not vice versa.
My phone watches and talks to me. It regularly tells me that I am a high fall risk with "very low walking steadiness." Just now it told me I burned far fewer calories over the last 5 weeks than the period before that. No surprise! In the last week, I have averaged 460 steps per day, a far shot from the usual target of 10,000 steps a day. Today I have taken 150 steps, some of them painful. All the health and exercise information my phone gives me is bad news and distressing.
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