Saturday, December 14, 2024
D+39
2008 President George W. Bush made his fourth and final trip to Iraq as president and was almost struck by two shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist during a farewell conference in Baghdad
In bed at 9:15, awake and up at 4:45.
LTMW I see 10 or 11 robins on and under the berry tree outside our kitchen and the usual visitors at our feeding station in view of my recliner. The temps today are mild (high of 37°), but it's windy, with the wind SE at 17 mph and gusts up to 26 mph.
Northwoods hideaway. I read a NYTimes review of a book titled "Cabin" by Patrick Hutchinson. It reminded me of my recurrent pipedream of escaping from television news, politicians, marketers, urban gun deaths, user names, passwords, and algorithms to a cabin in the Northwoods. Unrealistic, but aren't all pipedreams? We can't escape from the world as it is today: predators, climate change, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, pandemics, etc, but perhaps we could in a personal apocalyptic setting, i.e., going off to die alone, using the cabin as a rustic tomb. It's hardly a Walden setting or the happy setting of Huthinson's Cabin, nor idyllic except in my imagination. Does anyone want to die all alone? Do we know? Does anyone want to forego the blessings of sedation, anesthesia and analgesia when death may be preceded by pain? When I was a boy we had a "Happy Death Society" at St. Leo Parish, as normal a parish organization as the Altar and Rosary Society and the men's bowling league. There is a psychedelic band named 'The Happy Death Society'. The Bona Mors (or 'good death') Confraternity was founded at the Gesu Church in Rome centuries ago. Most of us who have filled out a living will, a DNR order or health care POA with instructions not to use artificial means to prolong life have nonetheless authorized measures to alleviate pain and discomfort. Most of us are fated to die, not in a cabin on a lake in the Northwoods, with eagles and ospreys soaring overhead and whitetails and black bears in the surrounding trees, but in a hospital, punctured and perforated with needles and tubes, listening to nurses and orderlies talking and laughing loudly as if no one were dying nearby. When my father was dying at Thunderbird Hospital in Phoenix, a Nurse Ratched-type telling Geri and me, when we arrived from Wisconsin, that he was already dead, or words to that effect. She said as coldly as if she were telling us a cab was waiting for us outside. I don't remember her exact words, but I remember the substance and her tone. Most of us would probably prefer not to spend our last days or hours in a hospital, but rather to die at home, like Nancy, but the burdens on family caregivers for a home death are not light This dying business can be messy, so it's easy to see why one might daydream about dying alone in a Northwoods hideaway.
Here's a great poem I dedicate to those noisy nurses and orderlies.
Musée des Beaux Arts
BY W. H. AUDEN
December 1938
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
A Note from this journal two years ago on this date:
Denny Dimwit One of the advantages of waking up early in the morning is the ability to quietly enjoy podcasts and longer feature articles in print media. This morning I listened to two Ezra Klein podcasts, one on the nature of and our perception of Time and the other an interview of novelist and short-story writer George Saunders. I was impressed, as I always am, with Klein's intelligence, knowledge, and curiosity. He's a fast talker and I almost always have difficulty keeping up with his comments and questions. I had the same thoughts about George Saunders whose college education was as in geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Listening to the two of them reminded me, though I need no reminding, of how slow-witted I am, or have become. I so often have to read texts a second or third time to try to figure out what is meant and following a rapid-fire (for me) conversation is a real challenge. Whoa! Slow down. Can you say that again and then pause to let me think about it?!?
How much dimmer a wit is Denny now, two years older? Am I coming down with dementia? I am even slower than I used to be, less sure-footed, more forgetful, more distractable, and more confused. Most tasks are experiments: can I do it? Can I read a text for more than three minutes without my vision blurring? Can I understand the sentences? One of the reasons to keep a journal is to keep tabs on myself. Can I still touch type? Can I still write coherently? What's going on with me healthwise, functionally, and mentally? Am I a hypochondriac or otherwise neurotic, or both? What have I lost recently, besides my beret? Who have I lost lately, besides Lilly? What am I losing now, besides my marbles?
Andy. It's been 8 days since I sent Andy the text message about Christmas and still no word back. I think I'm in the doghouse again, ghosted. It's disheartening, saddening.
The Food Chain. Two days ago I wrote: "Looking out our window over the kitchen sink, I see what I think is a kestrel, or sparrow hawk, standing atop and pinning down a smaller bird on the ground under the berry tree., waiting for it to die or to become unresisting enough to permit it to be eaten." The photo is what remains of the bird that was under the kestrel. From the color of its feathers, I suspect it was a slate-colored junco, a snowbird.
Mission accomplished (?) Three days ago I wrote: "I need to go to the library and check out some Heaney and some Giovanni. On the way, I need to admire and enjoy the sky and the trees and be thankful that I can make my way from home to the library warm and dry in a car that I own to take my pick of thousands of treasures." I ordered a couple of Heaney and Giovanni collections and picked them up today. On the way to the library, I did admire the evergreen trees on the west side of the freeway and thought how good it is to be able to see them peripherally while driving; the trees on the east side are blocked by the Bayside Wall. I think it is intended to be a sound barrier, at which it fails, something befitting Metropolis.. It succeeds in making the freeway drive northbound soulless. The trip to the library was well worthwhile. I browsed in the poetry section and checked out a volume of John Updike's poems and also picked up Donald Hall's book of essays Notes Nearing Ninety, which I've read before and enjoyed. I also enjoyed even more his Essays After Eighty. I don't know that I was consciously thankful for making my way to and from the library "warm and dry in a car that I own" but I was consciously thankful for getting outside and driving and for browsing the stacks. I was even more thankful for being able to share some words with a Black lady fellow patron and with the attendant at the checkout desk as I was leaving. (On the other hand, I tried to check out my books with my Costco Citi charge card, another instance of confusion and losing my marbles.)
Friends and Neighbors. Shirley and Barbara, Geri's walking buddies, stopped over as I retrieved mail from our mailbox. They brought her a framed photograph of Lilly that I took quite some time ago of Lily "at her post" as I called it, lying on our lawn at the NE corner of the house, looking up into Mequon where in the distance can be seen Geri, Shirly, and Barbara on one of their walks with Lilly watching them the whole way. It's an emotional photo for Geri and me and very kind of them to have it framed and brought to Geri. I got to chat with Barbara's daughter who was minding their mini-poodles on Wakefield while the three walkers were schmoozing. Grace-filled experiences all around.
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