Sunday, April 27, 2025
D+172/98
1877 Rutherford B. Hayes removed Federal troops from Louisiana, Reconstruction ends
1940 Himmler ordered the establishment of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp
1962 The US performed an atmospheric nuclear test at Christmas Island
In bed at 9, awake and up at 4:45 with hardly any pain. Go figure.
Prednisone, day 348; 2 mg., day 10/21; Kevzara, day 13/14; CGM, day 12/15; Trulicity, day 3/7. Prednisone at 5 a.m. Other meds at 6:45 a.m. The rising morning sun is moving steadily northward each day as Mother Earth tips steadily southward. It shines on the pantry door in the kitchen and soon will shine through the dining room door and narrowly into the sunroom. Vivaldi's Gloria, or the soprano voices in Mozart's Gloria in the Mass in C minor.
My Facebook post a year ago:
Tom Friedman, quoting Bernard-Henri Levy, speaks for most of us whose long lives are mostly behind us: " . . . the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren might collapse.” When I watch young neighbors walking their children along our street, or see parents walk their children into Kopp's for a frozen custard, or see scores of children as school lets out for the day walking home or getting into their buses, I almost inevitably have two emotional responses: elation, simply from the beauty of the children and of parents caring for children, and trepidation, sometimes dread, knowing and fearing the dangers in the world they are growing into. Friedman points to Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump (and Viktor Orban) as emblematic of those growing fascistic dangers, but what is most frightening is knowing that each of those menacing leaders attained and holds power only because of the support of millions of followers.
Anh posted this on Facebook yesterday:
Julianne Stanz·
He could have been buried in shoes polished to a shine, new and unmarked. But he wasn’t. Simple black shoes. Scuffed, worn, bruised. Much like all of us. He went to his rest in shoes that had known the dust of the streets, theweight of long journeys, the ache of standing alongside the poor, the forgotten, the heartbroken, and the lost.
He once wrote, "I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security." And so he was — a shepherd who smelled like his sheep, a pilgrim who bore the scuffs and stains of the road.
There was always a beautiful tension in Pope Francis' life: -A Jesuit who took the name of Francis. -A son of Latin America with roots deep in the soil of Europe. -A Pope who chose to be a shepherd, not a prince, who chose the cross, not the throne and not grandeur but simplicity.
When I saw his shoes, I thought of the shoes of St. Ignatius of Loyola — shoes worn thin by miles of wandering, teaching, and loving. The shoes of a pilgrim. The shoes of a man who believed the Gospel is not proclaimed by standing still, but by walking, by going, by risking, by loving. That is the path to Jesus.
Pope Francis lived as he died — showing us that the path to Jesus Christ is not paved in comfort but in courage. In not remaining inside but by going out. This is a path that leads to the margins, to the brokenhearted, to the overlooked corners of the world.
In his own words, spoken on April 12, 2023: "One does not proclaim the Gospel standing still, locked in an office, at one’s desk, or at one’s computer, arguing like ‘keyboard warriors’ and replacing the creativity of proclamation with copy-and-paste ideas taken from here and there. The Gospel is proclaimed by moving, by walking, by going."
Thank you, Holy Father, for walking the road with us — with scuffed shoes, a bruised heart and open arms.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
As I read these words, I thought of my mother. She died 52 years ago, at age 51. She has been dead now longer than she lived. After she died, I went into her bedroom for some reason I can no longer remember, but I remember seeing her work shoes on the floor. White, clean, but 'broken-in' and well-worn. I remember seeing them as somehow sacred or perhaps venerable, relics. I was deeply moved just looking at her shoes. Once she was gone, things that were her's took on a significance they had not had while she was still with us. Her time was up, shockingly, unbelievably, unimaginably, and so was our time with her. Her shoes, her work uniforms, her clothing, her rosary and prayer book, things that had been so ordinary and unnoteworthy, became imbued with significance and precious. I think of Emily in Our Town, brought back from the dead, seeing her mother in her kitchen before in earlier times:
Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!... I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. . . Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?
Now that I'm old and living each day in the death zone (the age when no one will say "Oh, he died so young, before his time" but rather "Well, he had a good life"), I try always to remember and to live Emily's late-found wisdom. Oh, Mama, look at me . . ." And to remember my Mom's work shoes. When I see my beloved wife's gardening shoes collected in the garage, or her shoes on the drying pad by the front door, or her shoes in the TV room, way back in my mind, I remember my mother's venerable work shoes and I count my blessings. When she occasionally says she can't find her shoes, I smile and count my blessings. When she speaks to me and shares her thoughts about anything, I count my blessings. Not always, because I am weak, unwise, and inconstant, but usually.
It might have been otherwise.
I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and
planned another day just like this day.
But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.
—Jane Kenyon
One year ago today, I stopped writing this daily journal because of severe pain. The entry the day before was "Rough night, cold (used winter jacket as blanket), very painful morning: hands, especially both shoulders, coupled with neck." I remember that night. I was in severe pain, 10/10, wishing I were dead, still two weeks away from getting diagnosed and prescribed prednisone.
The Taste of Things is the movie we watched on Hulu last night, mainly because it starred Juliette Binoche, one of my favorite actors. It's a love story about a gourmet cook, Eugénie, and her gourmet boss and lover, Dodin, played by Benoît Magimel. Magimel and Binoche were partners in real life years ago; they are parents of a daughter. In the film, they are both in love with food and with each other, although it's hard to tell which comes first. They finally become engaged, Dodin overcoming Eugénie's resistance to marriage, but she dies a natural death before they can tie the knot. The movie seems to be mostly gastronomic porn, with an enormous amount of footage devoted to the preparation and consumption of haute cuisine. I almost felt embarrassed and a bit put upon watching her preparing the food and him eating it. It seemed pagan, and I didn't enjoy it, though some reviewers thought it was terrific. On the other hand, I did enjoy the cinematography, which reminded me of Monet paintings, really well done.
There is an article in today's The Atlantic online titled "Does Anyone Still Hitchhike? Traveling by thumb isn’t popular anymore. Some say it should be," by Andrew Fedorov. One paragraph reads:
Despite all of that, Segarra believes we’d live in a better world if more people had hitchhiking experience. The practice exposed them to people they didn’t agree with politically—the type who might have seemed scary in media depictions but who turned out, in real life, to be friendly. Many who hitchhike become devotees of the practice for precisely this reason; after experiencing a sense of unity with such different people, they tend to proselytize. “It’s helped me trust people more,” Samuel Barger, a traveler from the New Jersey Pine Barrens, told me when we spoke about hitchhiking the Pan-American Highway for my newsletter. “I personally think everyone should hitchhike, at least once or twice, just to see what it feels like to be in need and to have someone help you.”
My significant hitchhiking experience is limited to the summer of 1961, when Ed Felsenthal and I had to get from the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas, back to the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, Virginia, near Norfolk. From my memoir:
When we were released from active duty, Ed and I stuck out our thumbs and hitchhiked 1700 miles back to Little Creek. We hitched day and night. One of us would stand at the side of the highway with his arm extended while the other stretched out alongside the road trying to get some sleep until the next ride came along. I don’t recall whether we used a hand-lettered sign (“U. S. Navy”) or not. I think probably not because I vividly recall being asked upon being picked up “You boys ain’t freedom riders, are you?” We stayed at a motel one night for sure (we were in bad need of shower facilities) and perhaps two. The motel night I remember was in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Hattiesburg was a ‘dry town,’ no bars or liquor stores. Ed and I were wiped out after a few days on the road and wanted to relax with a drink. The gentleman who picked us up on the highway and drove us into town dropped us off at the motel and went to his private club to get us a bottle of whiskey. We thanked him for his kindness as he left our room and he said “No need, boys. We do this for ‘most anybody, ’cept’n niggers.” Another driver in North Carolina, a dentist, gave us a jar of his moonshine that he kept under the passenger seat of his car. Spending days on the road in the summer of 1961 mooching rides from drivers in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia was a unique introduction to civility and incivility of the South during the bloody era of the civil rights movement, but not one I would like to repeat.
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