9/9/24

 Monday, September 9, 2024

 1920 Charles Edward Clausen was born in Fort Dodge, IA

1963 Alabama Governor George Wallace served a federal injunction to stop orders of state police to bar black students from enrolling in white schools

1985 President Reagan orders sanctions against South Africa, targeting apartheid

In bed at 8:45, up at 3:45, last hour or so half-sleeping, dreaming of DPL retiring and moving to Santa Ana, CA.    

Prednisone, day 119, 10 mg., day 25.  Prednisone at 5, 2 buttered slices of Dave's Bread w/ blueberry preserves at 5:15.  Morning meds at 5:35.

Dad's 104th birthday, if only.  I miss him, as I miss my mother and my sister and Uncle Jim, and as I miss Ed Felsenthal, DSB, TSJ, RHF, WSR, WBG, and the other 'dearly departed' of my family and friends.  I'm following in my Dad's footsteps of outliving so many of his family and friends, especially my mother.  I'm remembering the terrible telephone call from Kitty's house to his sister, our Aunt Monica, and her scream when she heard the bad news.  I also remember my telephone call to her when I was writing my memoir, asking her about Dad's condition when he returned from the war, and her resistance to talking about 'those terrible days.'    How grateful I am that after a lifetime of estrangement, we became as close as we were in the last years of his life, especially when he came to live with Geri and me when Geri became his best friend on earth. 

From my memoir:

In March of this year, I drove to Florida to visit my Aunt Monica and my Dad who was visiting her.  On the way, I listened to a ‘book on tape’ by Farley Mowat entitled “And No Birds Sang.”   The book describes the author’s service in the Canadian Army in the Italian campaign of World War II.  In it, he quoted a letter he received during the war from his father, himself a World War I veteran:

Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it.  The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs.   They’re the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them.  The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war and nobody understands or cares what happened to them.  I remember two striking examples of two men from my old company in the 4th Battalion, both damn fine fellows yet both committed suicide in the lines.  They did not shoot themselves.  They let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether.  They never knew what was the matter with them.  They had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out.

In another book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins discusses Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or more accurately, Remarque’s psychological and spiritual condition after the War to End All Wars.  He describes Remarque as

. . . a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction.  And in his search, Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben, the war experience. . .  “All of us were”, he said of himself and his friends in an interview in 1929, “and still are, restless, aimless, sometimes excited, sometimes indifferent, and essentially unhappy.”

  . . .

Remarque himself stated the purpose of All Quiet in a brief and forceful prefatory comment:

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure . . . It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.

Your grandfather was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.”  I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.”  He would not have survived on his own.  In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him.  I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for Kitty and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us.  Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’  She was pretty accurate.

. . .

As I look back on my life in the process of writing these letters, I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18.  He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy.  He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long distance call.)  He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972 and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him.  I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well.  Most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959 when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39.  Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future.  Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years.  The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality.  I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests.  If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show.  As far as I knw, he had no enthusiasm for anything.  I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car.  It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the Sox, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me.  I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.”  By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:

Poor Silas, . . .

. . .  nothing to look backward to with pride,

And nothing to look forward to with hope,

So now and never any different.

He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children.  I attribute his condition mostly to the war, to the Marines, and especially to the searing experiences on Iwo Jima.   

I could not be more grateful for the time we had together in Florida and especially in Wisconsin during his last years.   There have been times in my life when I have thought that belief in God may spring from the occasional need to thank Someone or Something for the Beauty in the world, for Life, like the 4th stanza of Yeat's poem Vacillation: 

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less 

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.  

I need to remember these lines and not to concentrate so often on the following stanza:

Things said or done long years ago,

Or things I did not do or say

But thought that I might say or do,

Weigh me down, and not a day

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Holy Week.  I listened to Part 2 of this The Atlantic podcast about the assassination of MLK and the aftermath, The Inferno, and Part 3, Black Messiah.   

Busy morning at the VA.  First a pedicure at podiatry. Then, a visit with Dr. Ryzka in Rheumatology Clinic.  Then a visit with Steve in Outpatient Physical Therapy for leg and knee weakness.  Then a stop at the Blood Draw Clinic, where I started a good conversation with the Army vet sitting next to me in the waiting room.  He got called in before me, saying he hoped we could continue our conversation when he was finished, but then I got called in and he still wasn't back so we weren't able to continue, a disappointment.

I did one set of all three PT exercises when I got home, the Supine Bridge and Sit to Stand and the Quad lifts., 3 sets of 10 reps each and now my legs are so weak it's a struggle to stand and walk.  This will be a long process.  Steve said not to expect much progress for 6 weeks or so.  Disipline, discipline.

Geri's visit with Dr. Graf.  The continuing pain in the knee is a result of two assaults on the same joint in a short period.  She needs to rest it until it gets better.  She's frustrated and disappointed, a hard pill to swallow for a person as naturally active as she is.