12/22/24

 Sunday, December 22, 2024

D+47

1894 Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison

1984 Bernhard Goetz shot 4 black muggers on NYC subway train

2001 British Islamic militant Richard Reid attempted to ignite explosives hidden in the soles of his shoes aboard a passenger airplane.

2010 Barack Obama signed the legislation repealing the military policy of "Don't ask, don't tell', clearing the way for gay Americans to serve in the military

2023 UN Security Council voted to speed up delivery of desperately needed aid for Gaza 13-0 with Russia and the US abstaining 

In bed at 9, had a low glucose alarm at 2:55 cured with a cough drop, up at 4:50.  Did a load of laundry.  

Prednisone, day 222, 7.5 mg., day 37.  Prednisone at 5:00 and other meds at 10:30.

I'm running out of steam, thinking I've lived too long, wondering how long I've felt this way.  How often I have wished that I were not alive, going back to my childhood, back to 6th grade, age 11, when I was so miserable, so depressed, from the combination of my father's depression and PTSD and the grim picture of Life painted by the Irish Catholic, which is to say American, Church, with its images of Hellfire and sin, the Last Judgment, and the nasty part of Matthew 25: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."  From my memoir:

In any case, most of my elementary school days are a blur to me.  I do remember, however, being completely miserable in the 6th grade and wanting to leave home.  I was often miserable at school and miserable at home.  I remember walking home along Emerald Avenue and passing through the 75th viaduct, under the train tracks, and wishing I could run away.  It seems melodramatic to describe an 11 year old as profoundly and persistently unhappy, but so I was.  My Dad was still a heavy drinker, chronically crabby and living with his own demons.  My mother was waiting on tables and struggling to keep my Dad from going further over the edge, the family together, food on the table, a roof (and hot water pipes) over our heads, and the tuition paid at St. Leo’s.  When my father would act particularly badly, my mother would “let him have it,” and the air in our semi-subterranean abode would be charged with anger and vitriol.  This must have been the year when I started consciously longing for my mother to leave my father, to take Kitty and me away from the drunkenness, the chronic crabbiness, the fighting and unhappiness.  This was also the year in which I had to consciously deal with the notion of Sinning Against Faith, of the need to confess religious Doubt.  Some of what I was taught at St. Leo’s seemed to be to be unbelievable, bullshit, but it came from adult authority figures I had been taught to revere: nuns in black robes and priests who wore laces and brocades and spoke a mysterious language at Mass.  This was also about the time that my Temple of the Holy Ghost was developing a mind of its own.  There was no one to talk to about these matters.  Discussing it with a priest or nun was unthinkable.  My father was no help.  Kitty was too little and she had her own sadness to deal with.  My mother would have told me to listen to the priests and nuns about the religious stuff and about my father, she would have reminded me, as she often had occasion to, that my father loved Kitty and me, “he just didn’t know how to show it.”  That she had to assure us of his undemonstrated love so often in those years was evidence of the shakiness of the assurances.  Even without using magic words, however, love can shown with a kiss, a hug, a smile, a twinkle in the eye, a wink, a pat on the back, a handshake, a thumbs up, an arm around the shoulder.  It can be shown by reading or telling a story, singing a song, rocking to sleep, a trip to the park, a piggyback ride,  a fishing or baseball outing, a game of catch, a sharing of humor or in any of a million other ways.  Kitty and I saw none of that.  One who has little love for himself has little love to share, even with his children.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, I had recurrent terrible headaches in those years.  When one would strike, all I could do was lie in bed with a pillow or blanket over my eyes and wait for it to go away.  The headaches were accompanied by nausea and vomiting so aspirins did no good.  My mother called them sinus headaches, but I suspect they were ordinary migraines or cluster headaches.   

 It wasn't until about 70 years later that Kitty told me that she had the same desire that I had in those days, i.e., that my mother would leave my father and take us away.  It was from our long, daily, early morning conversations that I came to understand that she was at least as miserable from living with my father as I was, and probably more miserable.  I moved away to go to college at age 18 whereas she lived with his emotional stinginess until she married and moved out from under his roof, though never far from their home.   Her theory was that he was jealous of us, that he saw us as competition for our mother's attention and affection.  That seems pretty sick to me, but he was indeed very sick after the war, for years after the war.  In any event, it's clear to me now that both Kitty and I 'caught' his PTSD.  "Military personnel who have seen or participated in abusive acts of violence have been found to transmit the trauma they experienced to their children. . . Children whose parent was diagnosed with PTSD had a higher rate of anxiety as well as aggression when compared to children of civilians or non-veterans  These children can also have increased depressive symptoms and other PTSD symptoms."   In the case of Kitty and me, we also had PTSD caused by the sexual assault and torture of our mother in 1947, its effect on both our parents and the fact that we continued to live in that crime scene for several years thereafter.  We were like the lines apocryphally attributed to or said about W. B. Yeats: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

That 'abiding sense of tragedy' has stuck with me, certainly when I was dumped by my 'first true love,' Charlene, when I returned from my summer of active duty on a Navy destroyer.  There have been times I have wondered whether I ever got over that shock.  The year or years after I returned from Vietnam were also, in different ways, shocking to me, not only the culture shock of seeing America through different eyes but also personal shocks.  Loss of innocence? What innocence did I have to begin with?  In any case, I did not endure the wish not to be alive that accompanies deep depression.  There was no suicidal ideation.  That would come with chronic severe pain that I had for years in and about my bladder and then with PMR.  Now I have a different pain, not prompting suicidal thoughts but making me wonder whether I have lived too long.  A mixed blessing.

On the other hand, as I type these words, a young whitetail doe walks past my window on the world followed by a young buck, both only a few feet from me and I am delighted.  I see that not only are their tails white, but also the insides of their alert ears.  The doe (or is it a young buck?) and buck linger for quite a while.  Now a fawn has also appeared and I experience not a thrill but rather a deep, deep delight.  I think back to my first neighborhood at the intersection of West 73rd Street and South Emerald Avenue in the Englewood/Auburn/Gresham district on the south side of Chicago.  How would I have reacted to three (or to one!)  elegant, graceful, whitetail deer in my front yard, just a few feet away from where I sat?  In such an impossible event, I would indeed have been not just deeply delighted but truly thrilled, beside myself,  overjoyed.  How would I have reacted if I had seen a red-breasted nuthatch land just inches from my nose, as one did on Thursday?  Or if I had even seen much less known the species of a red-breasted nuthatch? of any nuthatch?  When he was a child growing up in Englewood, my Dad thought goldfinches were canaries, probably because the only birds he saw in Englewood were sparrows, robins, occasional blue jays and cardinals, and perhaps canaries in cages.   I got a thrill out of feeding peanuts in the shell to gray squirrels.  That was pretty much my encounter with wildlife outside of the Brookfield and Lincoln Park Zoos.  That and the horses that pulled the milk trucks, vegetable trucks, and "ragsalion" or rags and iron scavengers at the end of the big war.  I mention all this just to remind myself that I still derive much pleasure from being alive and have much for which I am very grateful, starting with Geri.   My body parts are failing me and one of these days will shut down completely.  My mental functions are slowing down and diminishing too as I am almost halfway through my 9th decade, 'playing with house money.'  Despite my current grief, I know I have much to be thankful for.

A journal entry from two years ago this date:

Sarah Smarsh, What Growing Up on a Farm Taught Me About Humility  "Even as a child, I understood that families like mine, poor rural farmers, were low in the pecking order. Television shows and movies portrayed us as buffoons and hicks, always the butt of the joke.   We didn’t need those cues to know that society held us in low esteem, though. All we had to do was look at our bank accounts.  We worked the land and killed animals so that others would eat, so that we would afford propane for the winter, and so that the rich, rigged industry we supplied grain to would become a little richer. . . The profound humility instilled in me by my upbringing left no room in my worldview for exceptionalism of any sort. It also left me troubled by the ways that most humans calculate the value of things — animals, plants, land, water, resources, even other people — according to hierarchies that suit their own interests.  From there, near the bottom of the proverbial social ladder — where women drove tractors and people of all races lived in single-wide trailers — I began to see through the many false narratives of supremacy that govern our society. That men are better than women. That white people are better than everyone else. That the rich are better than the poor. Even, yes, that human beings are better than animals. . . . But guilt for crimes committed against other species and against the earth is not equally shared. Wealthy corporations and the governments beholden to them, choosing profit over sustainability and moral decency, created and fortified the food systems with which the average individual has little choice but to engage."

I highly admire Sarah Smarsh who wrote Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  I loved the book and read it near the same time I read Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, another remarkable memoir by another remarkable young woman.  I journal portions of Smarsh's essay from this morning's NYT because (1) Smarsh wrote it, and (2) because of her references to social classifications and categorizations, and (3) her references to corporate capitalist hegemony in the food industry, and (4) her reference to the challenges of complicity in the world in which we live.  There are times I am weighed down, in rare and not particularly welcome moments of moral clarity, by thoughts of my own complicity in so much of modern life that I purport, in moments of high moral dudgeon, to hate.  When I get too uncomfortable with my own complicities and hypocrisies, I remind myself that we live in the dystopic world we live in, not in utopia.  'Two pounds of ground beef, please, and 6 links of the veal sausage.'

A journal entry from one year ago on this date:

Why keep a journal?   I've wondered about this many times and I've written about it a few times.  In this morning's NYT, Frank Bruni has an essay titled "Our Semicolons, Ourselves.  Excerpts:

Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.

Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear. That’s why so many people keep journals. They want more than just a record of what’s happening in their lives. They want to make sense of it.

Bruni's comments remind me of the Flannery O'Connor quote in a letter she wrote, a comment that I believe to be true of me: ". . . .  I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."  I don't expect anyone but me to read my blog/journal and so far I haven't been disappointed nor do I expect to be.  That being the case, I often tolerate my run-on and otherwise awkward sentences to remain uncorrected. I'm also a fan of non-sentences, part sentences.  It seems to me that we often, maybe usually, think in non-sentences and talk that way so why not when the occasion permits write that way too.  My biggest fault is wordiness, way too many unnecessary words which my good friend, now deceased, David Branch would line through ruthlessly with his red editing ballpoint.  Often I would follow his writing advice and often I wouldn't.  Sometimes I would like the words too much to excise them, even if they were a bit redundant and unnecessary.  David was a graduate of Yale undergraduate school and Harvard law, a very bright and well-educated guy.  I always took his editing advice seriously, even when I eschewed it.  He would probably advise me to eschew the word eschew.  I daresay he would also find troubling my frequent use of hyphenated words and occasionally random use of capitalized initial letters in words that oughtn't be capitalized, yes in German but not in English.  Nonetheless, one of the advantages of writing that has no readers other than the author is that you can do stuff like that.   Dear David Branch would run out of red ink going over my writing in this journal.  How I wish he were still with us.