11/27/2025

 Thursday, November 27, 2025

Thanksgiving Day

1891 Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum" was published

1922 Adolf Hitler spoke to 50,000 national socialists in Munich

1938 Germany banned Jews from being lawyers

1967 Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota) announced he would run for the presidency on an anti-Vietnam War platform

1998 Deutsche Bank announced a $10 billion deal to buy Bankers Trust, thus creating the largest financial institution in the world

1999 In Seattle, protests against the WTO meeting by anti-globalization protesters forced the cancellation of the opening ceremonies

2020 Los Angeles County began a three-week stay-at-home order for 10 million people to combat a COVID-19 surge

2024  Christine Cummings Klaer, January 18, 1941 - November 27, 2024

In bed by 9, up at 4:20 a.m., 29°, wind chill 7°, high of 33°.

Meds. etc.  Morning meds at 9:40 a.m.

Beautiful skies this morning.  I left for the Metro Market at 6:50 a.m., with the sky about 70% overcast.  By the time I left the store, it was about 30% overcast and beautiful.  I admired it as I filled up the gas tank at the Shell station and as I drove home on Port Road.  Single digit wind chills made filling the gas tank a little unpleasant since I didn't have any gloves on.  Winter has arrived.  8 to 19 inches of snow expected on Saturday.  Yikes.  I'm thankful to Janine G. for opening my eyes to the beautiful skies above me each day.

Thanksgiving Day.  We're expecting a crowd for dinner: Steve and Nikki; David, Sharon, and Ellis; Mary Beth Celek and her brother from Colorado.  ETA 2:30, dinner at 4.  Geri has been working to get ready for the dinner for days, planning, shopping, cleaning, making seating arrangements, etc.  She is, as usual, remarkable.

I woke up thinking about my FB post sharing Robert L. Arnold's podcast about American healthcare.  I wrote about being poor during my childhood, and this morning I wondered if I've become squirrelly in my old age and, if I have, is it OK to let that be known publicly to my FB friends, including my children.  I suspect it is, but I hope that when I get too squirrelly, some dear one will find a way to let me know.  Speaking of Robert L. Arnold's podcast, I exchanged messages with Janine Geske at 5 this morning:

I also wish you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was so wonderful to spend time with you last week. We both love you and Geri. The guy in the podcast posts something every day and I always enjoy listening to him. He makes such good points in a thoughtful way.

I replied to Janine

Thank you for introducing me to him.  He's terrific.  And thanks for what seems like a lifetime of friendship, a blessing.

Today is the anniversary of my cousin Christine's death at age 83.  We were good friends as children.  We grew up together in the years after World War II, 5 first cousins living only half a mile from each other, Jimmy, Christine, and Dougie Cummings, living with their Mom, Aunt Monica, and sharing a two-flat with our paternal grandparents, Grampa Dewey and Grandma Charlotte Clausen .  Ours were complicated relationships, not that we cousins were aware of it as children.  Monica was a single mom raising three children with the help of Dewey and Charlotte.  We always assumed she was divorced and that her husband, Scottie Cummings, was a ne'er-do-well womanizer.  The latter assumption was, I think, true enough, but I've never been sure about the supposed divorce.  In any case, after their separation, she never dated or remarried, though she was quite beautiful.  Indeed, she was a beauty contest winner, Miss Illinois Bell, from her employment as a long-distance operator.  Our cousins loved our Dad, Uncle Charles, who, along with Grampa Dewey, was a substitute father figure for them.  For my sister Kitty and me, he was often worse than an absent father; we both wished our Mom would leave him, take us away from him.  Cousin Jimmy was 2 years older than me, and we were friendly, but we never had the close relationship I had with Christine and Dougie.  My Dad was especially fond of Jimmy, so fond that I always thought he wished Jimmy were his son rather than me.  I learned late in life that my sister Kitty and I shared the same doubt, i.e., whether we were really Dad's children.   Christine was about half a year older than me, and Dougie was almost exactly one year younger.  I spent a lot of time with Dougie and had a kind of a crush on Christine, who was very pretty, vivacious, and always upbeat.  Dougie, on the other hand, was the opposite: not as good-looking as his older brother and sister, not as even-keeled as either of them, a bed-wetter and tantrum-thrower.  He was often in trouble at school, got expelled from De La Salle Catholic high school, joined the Navy, but spent time in the brig for misconduct, and was discharged early with a less-than-honorable discharge, not 'dishonorable' or perhaps even a bad conduct discharge, but not the desired honorable discharge.  He hated the Navy for the rest of his life, blaming his time in the brig for his lifelong emotional and legal troubles and incarceration later in his life.  He and his brother Jimmy were estranged as adults, though Jimmy provided housing for him and their mother in Florida, down the street from my Dad.  Christine maintained a caring and supportive relationship with Doug until her death, a year ago today.  Grandma Charlotte was pissed off at life. She had a bit of a mean streak.   We grandchildren didn't dislike her, but we all warmed up to  Grampa Dewey much more than we did to her.  She didn't like my mother; she seemed to think she wasn't good enough for her precious Charles.  Monica and our mother, though, were good friends, a two-woman mutual support society, Monica with the 3 kids and a missing husband, our Mom with 2 kids and a sullen, withdrawn, alcohol-abusing veteran with PTSD.  On the other hand, Monica, who was almost 3 years older than my Dad, was sympathetic to him and protective of him after the war, and indeed throughout his life.  In those years after the war, we cousins were kids growing up and understanding little of what was going on all around us.  As I think back on those days, I think of Willie Nelson's lyrics in "Me and Paul," Well, it's been rough and rocky traveling  / But I'm finally standing upright on the ground / And after taking several readings / I'm surprised to find my mind's still fairly sound.  But only 'fairly.'

I love the snapshot of us five cousins and Aunt Monica taken on my Dad's 80th birthday, 9/9/2020, in North Port, Florida.  I especially love that it captured a happy moment for all of us.  My Dad, Monica, and Doug lived in North Port, and Kitty, Christine, and I (along with Geri, Jim Reck, and Nora Cummings) flew in for the celebration.  We were drawn together by love of one another, love that existed despite all the historical stresses in our family.  The photo is emblematic of some of the relationships within the family.  First, the love, but then, ithin minutes of this photo being taken, as we drove out of the Family Table parking lot where it was taken, Jimmy and Doug got into a nasty argument.  That evening, Doug got into a fight with his girlfriend, who called the police, with whom Doug refused to cooperate, so he ended up arrested, thrown in jail, requiring Jimmy, Jim Reck, and me to drive up to Sarasota to bail him out.  Monica was terribly upset, Christine was concerned and protective of Doug, and Nora was a buttinsky.  The family gathering wasn't ruined, but it sure was darkened.  So it went, and so it goes, not with all families but with some and surely with ours.  It is, I suppose, an odd set of memories to call up on Thanksgiving, but I do so in part because it's the anniversary of Christine's death, and it's going on 4 years since Kitty's death.  The youngest of the 5 of us died first, and Christine died second.  Only the boys remain, and we have no contact with one another.  And, with my family and step-family, the holiday season mostly reminds me of how fragmented and unblended my family life has become.  It causes me sorrow and makes Thanksgiving and Christmas more sad times than happy seasons.  So it goes.

But enough of sad thoughts and memories.  I devoted part of the morning to them, but the afternoon and evening are times for gratitude, for more things than I can count, for those who will be here with us, drawn by ties of love, for the home in which we will gather, for the food we will eat and the wine we will drink, and the conversations we will share.  I'm at an age when I know this may be my last gathering like this, maybe yes, maybe no.  But that thought does make me sad or fearful.  

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance . . .