9/19/24

 Thursday, September 19, 2024

In bed at 9, awake around 3:30, half-sleep with bait bucket thoughts till I was up and about at 4:20.    

Prednisone, day 128, 7.5 mg., day 7.   I had some mild chest pains in the middle of the night and some palpitations before 7.  Prednisone at 5:40.  Breakfast of oat cereal w/berries and morning meds at 8:40.

How Old Am I? is a song by Frank Sinatra that's earworming me this morning, It's on his great 1965 September of My Years album.  It popped up in my brain as I started to read an old New Yorker article by Toni Morrison, "The Work You Do, The Person You Are,"  Morrison was born in 1931. She was more than 10 years older than me. in her essay, she wrote about features of her youth that I also grew up with: plastic-covered sofas, women's seam-up-the-back stockings, the milkman, and the iceman.  The mention of the milkman and the iceman caught my attention, bringing back memories of horse-drawn milk wagons during and for a time after the War, and of the ice box on the enclosed back porch at Aunt Monica's house, where their neighbor Clarence used to sing "Peg of my heart" to our assembled family.  In the summer months, we kids would grab shards of ice from the back of ice wagons when the ice man was making his deliveries to homes, taverns, and grocery stores.  I remember too the coal men who made their deliveries through basement windows to storage bins near the coal furnaces.  Carl Semrau, our kindly next-door neighbor, let me watch him load the coal into the furnace and remove the clunky ashes after the coals had done their job of heating the building.  I remember the occasional Wanzer or Bowman Dairy milk horse who decided she had worked enough for the day and started walking back to the horse barn while the milkman was making his deliveries.  My father had a milk route for a while and took me with him at least once on his rounds.  In those days after the War, he never held on to any job for any length of time, PTSD.  Those were the days before television when we read at night or listened on the radio to Fibber McGee & Molly, or The Shadow ("The weed of crime bears evil fruit.  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!", or Duffy's Tavern ( "Hello, Duffy's Tavern, where the elite meet to eat. Archie the manager speakin'. Duffy ain't here—oh, hello, Duffy."  There were no home computers then, no laptops, no internet, no copy machines, faxes, or printers.  Our one telephone was mounted on the wall and we shared a party line with another customer, a stranger.  Long-distance calls were expensive and had to be placed through a long-distance operator at Illinois Bell, like Aunt Monica or Geri's mom, Edith.  Later, when long-distance calls were cheaper, when my mother called us long distance, I could count on my father's voice in the background saying "Let's not run up the phone bill!"  

According to the 2020 Census, fewer than 2% of the US population are 85 and older.  I wonder what the percentage is for 83 and older, 2.5?  The median age in the US is a little less than 39.  I am reminded of a class I taught many years ago at the law school in which I referred to an imaginary couple, Joe LunchBucket and Betty Babushka.  I received quizzical looks in the class at the word "babushka," meaning a full-sized headscarf tied under the chin.  No one in the class was familiar with the term.  I was astounded since babushkas were the most common headwear for women as I was growing up.  Years later I made an offhand reference to some common term from the Vietnam War era and again no one in the class knew what I was talking about.  I then recognized that most of them had not been born in the Vietnam War era, which to them was ancient history, as was I, a relic, a dinosaur.

Homo sapiens?  We fool ourselves in thinking of our species as wise or rational.  All of the news of warfare in Europe (Ukraine) and in the Middle East (Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Yemen) convinces me that we are less rational than the beasts of the fields and forests.  In Russia, it's a crime to refer to "the special military operation" in Ukraine as a "war."  Each side inflicts massive casualties on the other and for what?   Can anyone believe that Ukraine will win this war against Russia's massive superior resources in terms of population and other resources?  The conflict must be resolved ultimately by negotiation and some agreed to or unavoidable redrawing of boundaries, probably with at least the Crimean Peninsula and much of Donbas under the control of Moscow.   Today in Lebanon, Hexbollah's leader in "a speech to the nation" (what nation?) decried Israel's pager and walkie-talkie attack as "an act of war!", as if the two sides haven't been engaging in warfare for years, exchanging rocket, missile, and artillery fire into each other's territories.  “The enemy transgressed all boundaries and red lines,” Nasrallah said.  Since when have there been ' boundaries and red lines" recognized by either side?  Israel and the US call Hezbollah a "terrorist" organization, but what are we to think of the detonation of apparently thousands of explosions in civilian areas all over Lebanon?

Chris Christie: "Politics ain't beanbag,," Jan. 9, 2014;  Neither is poetry.

QUERIES TO MY SEVENTIETH YEAR by Walt Whitman

Approaching, nearing, curious,

Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?

Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?

Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?

Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,

Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack'd voice harping, screeching?

I tried to do a "knock off" response to Whitman's poem a few years ago.  Here are some of the word choices I looked at.

(REPLYING NEAR) (REPLIES FRP,) QUERIES TO MY SEVENTIETH YEAR by C. D. Clausent

Approaching, nearing, curious,

The Thou dim, uncertain  moreclearer and more certain (surer) rspectre—bringest thou life or death? diminished life and then death.

Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?  Touch, taste, hearing, taste, and smell  (on the ebb)(dull)(wane) (evaporate)(abate) (all fail.)

Mobility, memory, identity, self (evanesce) (on the wane) all fade

(Till all are gone.) Cut me short (for good)  (Spare me the burden guilt of cutting my mother's dream projeet work wish gift hope suffering sacrifice    I cannot stay as now.

Amyloids, proteins, calcium plaques (will) see to that Calcium amyloids, and other plaques or plasia eventually have their way

You cannot will not leave me here as now     spretermit leave as done do violence to foreclose

I'm clearly no poet and certainly no Whitman but I'm blessed with being moved by much of the poetry of otheres, escpecially Walt Whitman, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, Jan Kenyon, Randall Jarrell, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Mary Oliver, W. B. Yeats, Maggie Smith, Robert Burns, who am I forgetting???  This list is not in any order and I can't engage in rank ordering them.  What standard of measurement or comparison would I use, each poem being unique, incommensurable?  I'm reminded of a phrase I encountered reading his autobiography of C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy many decades ago.  He wrote of loving the landscapes of his native Northern Ireland where he grew upo and of England where he went to school and of refusing to compare the two, eschewing "the pernicious tendency to compare and prefer" incomparable things..  Which of the below is preferable?  better than the others?