12/14/2025

 Sunday, December 14, 2025

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

2024  Pope Francis opens the Holy Door of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, inaugurating the church's Jubilee Year of Hope

In bed at 9, moved to LZB around 12? 1?, awakened by text message from Sarah in Thailand around 2, back to bed, not much sleep, up at 4:30 with a runny nose and bothersome cough.    

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at ? a.m.    

Earl's pecan tree reminds me of our china cabinet full of Geri's family heirlooms: her good china, her Mom's good china, their crystalware, serving dishes, etc., some delicate pieces of Beleek porcelain that we brought back from our honeymoon in Ireland, sterling silver wedding gifts.  None of these pieces are used by us, even for family holiday dinners, and none of Geri's boys or their wives want any of it.  It reminds me too of my memoir and the journal I've maintained for the last few years.  They, along with my paintings and drawings are destined for the incinerator or the landfill when I join Earl in our landfills.  Sic transit gloria mundi or so it goes.  The closer I draw to my final days, the more aware I become of the ephemerality of everything and everyone.

Spring and Fall

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Gerard Manley Hopkins

1844 – 

1889

              to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost
1874 – 
1963
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.