Tuesday, March 4, 2025
D+117
1865 Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for his 2nd term as US President. The man who would assassinate him weeks later, John Wilkes Booth, was photographed attending the inauguration.
1911 Victor Berger (Wisc) became the 1st socialist congressman in the US
Prednisone, day 317, 5 mg., day 28, Kevzara, day 1/14. prednisone at 5:20 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Other meds at miday. My 1 mg. prednisone pills arrived this afternoon and I'll start them tomorrow, 4 mg. per day, IF I can open the incredibly difficult container. I may have to resort to the blacksmith hammer.
Telephone conference with Kevzara pharmacist Mary Jo for more than 1/2 hour this afternoon. It was almost all duplicative of what Dr. Ryzka told me and what I knew already from 2 prior injections.
Sweet-sour cabbage borscht. I spent a good part of the afternoon making the borscht. It made me wonder if it's worth the time and effort, but I don't know where I could buy this soup if I weren't making it myself. I'm missing Sy's Deli at 15th and Wells, where I was introduced to it. It's long gone as part of Marquette's urban renewal and "progress", along with the Abbot Crest lunchroom, Dal's hamburgers, the University Store on Wisconsin and 12th Street, Joe's Barber Shop nest to the Union, the butcher shop on Wells Street, Bob Callahan's bar on Clybourn Avenue, the Stratford bar, and much more.
From last year's journal on this date:
A year ago today I blew out Kitty's Yahrzeit candle and noted that its flame was small and steady. I reflected that it was like Kitty herself who went through life quietly and unobtrusively, never seeking attention for herself but spreading quiet goodness wherever she went. Those who were quietly blessed by her goodness included many family members, including our aunt-by-marriage, Mary Horgan, widow of our Uncle Bud, who lived with and was cared for by Kitty for decades after Bud's death, her sister-in-law Jerry Reck, whom Kitty took into her home and cared for in the last years of Jerry's life, our father who lived with and was cared for by Kitty during the last few years of his life, Jim Reck's niece Mary, who suffered so much during her life and had a second home with Kitty during much of her last years, and of course me, her brother, of whom she unwaveringly thought so much, though I didn't deserve it. But she didn't restrict sharing her goodness and love to family members. She deprecated herself as "just the cleaning lady" for the many elderly families she served, but for all or almost all of them she became a trusted friend, for some almost a family member. Their children who lived out of state had Kitty's cell phone number and would regularly call her to check on their parents. Her elderly clients loved and trusted Kitty and so did their children, and for good reasons. There were also all those people she helped over the years as a volunteer in the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the homeless people she helped feed at André House in downtown Phoenix, and all the children and parents she helped every year in her Christmas Adopt-a-Family program. On my visits, I saw her on the telephone for hours with the giving and receiving folks in the Christmas program. I accompanied her on food distribution circuits for SVDP and volunteered with her (and her daughter Chrissie) at André House. She sought no credit for any of her good works. She did them because they needed to be done and she could do them. It was all "out of the goodness of her heart." If ever there was a saint, one who lived the life called for in Matthew 25:31-46, it was St. Kitty.
I'm grateful for candles. I blew out Kitty's Yahrzeit candle at 4:10 this morning but I have her in mind today, with thankfulness. A few years ago, when Kitty's insomnia seemed worse than usual, I sent her a red votive candle holder and a box of votive candles. I asked her to light a candle when she was up all alone in the middle of the night, sitting in their spare bedroom she called my bedroom, and let the candle remind you that your brother is with you. Later I bought a red holder for myself and my own box of candles and I would light my candle before daybreak when I was up alone, usually texting with her. I think of that as my "Kitty candle" and I always think of her when I see it or light it. Candles are big in Catholic culture, including the Irish Catholic culture in which we grew up. Catholic churches always had at least one wrought iron rack of votive lights in red holders somewhere in the church along with waxed wicks for lighting them and a depository for offerings. "I'll light a candle for you" was a way of saying I'll be praying for you. Lighting a candle was also a traditional way of praying for the 'dearly departed' or for praying for God's intercession in a time of danger or need. I suppose those little candles burning in the sanctified space of the church long after the offering churchgoer was gone was a way of symbolizing the continuation of the precatory prayer after the offeror had left the church.
Whatever the symbolism, I always liked those rows of votive lights in the church and liked to light them for whatever reason. When I was an altar boy in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade at St. Leo Grammar School one of my duties was to light the candles on the main alter before mass, one candle on each side of the tabernacle for a 'low mass,' 3 on either side for a 'high mass.' There is, or perhaps now I should say 'was', a large body of regulatory church law on the number of candles to be used for low masses, high masses, solemn high masses, pontifical masses, 40-hour devotions, benedictions, and eucharistic adorations. Those regulations are, or were, just a small part of the legalistic, spirit-killing, formalism that led and still leads so many people to reject traditional Catholicism. They are part and parcel with customs and regulations that have priests wearing chasubles, albs, cinctures, and stoles, that have bishops wearing silly-looking miters and carrying croziers or shepherd's crooks, and wearing very expensive different colored vestments for different liturgical seasons Many religionists eat that stuff up; others are repelled by it. But as it is often said, you can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy. I still 'light a candle' for my dear sister.
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