1/1/2026

 January 1, 2026

From last year's 1/1/25 journal

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.  I start this new year - perhaps my last, perhaps not - reflecting on how much beauty surrounds me, beauty in nature, beauty in things, beauty in people.  In searching for this photo of an exquisite mushroom that I espied serendipitously in our front yard one day, at one moment, I passed hundreds of other photos of things and people of beauty, of Geri, or Geri and Lilly, of Andy and his children, of Sarah and Christian, of Ed Felsenthal, of birds, of trees, and so much more.  As I type this, I also watch a gray squirrel with his beautiful white belly and ear tufts performing an acrobatics show for me on a suet cake holder.  Extraordinary! and common!  I think of Mary Oliver's When Death Comes: "I think of each life as a flower, as common / as a field daisy, and as singular."  My hope is that, despite my cynicism, pessimism, and dejection at the wrongs and miseries of the world, I remember that, as I've told my children and still believe, we are surrounded by saints and miracles.  We just have to open our eyes wide enough to see them.

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1946 Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced he was not a god

1950 Ho Chi Minh began the offensive against French troops in Indo-China

1951 Chicago broadcaster Paul Harvey began his national radio program "Paul Harvey News and Comment" from WENR-AM for the ABC network

1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect

2925  A 42-year-old American army veteran, Shamsud-Din Jabbar,  plowed through a New Year's Eve celebration on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in a rented pick-up truck; with an ISIS flag attached and IEDs on board; 14 people died, dozens were injured, and the driver was killed in a shoot-out with police.

In bed on New Year's Eve by 10, up at 7:20 after several pit stops from too much cheesecake.  9/-2/15/8,  Brrr.    

Meds. etc.  Morning meds at  11:30 a.m.

On New Year's Eve, Geri prepared a delicious meal of lamb chops, roasted potatoes, and green beans, topped off with a Costco cheesecake, of which I ate far too much, leading, I think, to intestinal woes during the night.  Reckless behavior for which I'm still paying.  We watched a 'double feature,' Maggie's Plan and The Savages.  Maggie's Plan was a frothy comedy with Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Julianne Moore, Bill Hader, and Maya Rudolf.  There was nothing frothy about The Savages, which was a bit painful to watch.  It told the story of two emotionally stunted, semi-estranged siblings, Laura Linney as Wendy and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon, putting their nasty, demented father, Phillip Bosco as Lenny, into a nursing home.  Each of the principal characters is an unhappy person.  Wendy and Jon were abandoned as children by their mother and raised and physically and emotionally abused by Lenny.  She is a struggling playwright,  working on a play about their terrible childhood.  Jon is a theater professor, working on a book about Bertolt Brecht.  I thought the movie was really well written, acted, and directed.  Laura Linney was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Philip Seymour Hoffman won a Golden Globe as Best Actor.  It was painful to watch because it depicted the father's falling apart and losing agency in his old age, not a lighthearted subject for viewers in their 80s, and because it inescapably reminded me of my sister Kitty and me growing up with my Dad after WWII.  He was never physically abusive to Kitty or me, but he was, on at least one occasion, with my mother, and he was unloving, almost hostile with Kitty and me.  I've written about it many times in this journal and in my memoir, and discussed it frequently with Kitty in the last several years of her life; I needn't reflect on it here, although I did while watching the film.  Painful.

She Spent a Night in the Anne Frank House. And Met Ghosts is a piece in this morning's NY Times about author Lola Lafon's book, "When You Listen to This Song."  I don't want to write about the subject of the article, though it prompts memories of Geri's and my late-night visit to the Anne Frank House in August of 2016, after Sarah and Christian's wedding.  It was too late to gain admission, but I recall standing outside and needing to touch the building, to feel the solid reality of the building and to feel the reality of happened there, just a few doors down the street from a Christian church.  I read the readers' comments to the article, which included references to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Wannsee Museum in Berlin.  It reminded me that the Holocaust Museum is in our national capital only about a quarter-mile from the National Museum of African American History and Culture and that both institutions contain vivid records of our species'  history of atrocity.    Homo hominis lupus.  They are only a few minutes' walk across the Mall from the White House and half an hour's walk from the Capitol.

Mayor Mamdani.  I watched the tail end of his inaugural speech this afternoon, in which he promised much. I hope not too much.  For an old, former Democratic Socialist like me, it was pretty thrilling.  I wondered whether he will be able to get near to fulfilling his promises with so many forces arrayed against him.  He is merely a mayor, not a president or even a governor.  Will he have the resources he needs to provide free child care, and bus and subway fares ( or is he promising only no increases during his term of office?)?  Is it credible that Trump and his allies will not seek to crush him and his agenda?  Fingers crossed.

Favorite opening line of the young year is by Susan Glasser in her December 30th New Yorker article "Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful: A damage assessment of the President’s first year back in the White House."  "No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.

I watched and listened to an old favorite, Verdi's Messa da Requiem, while Geri was a good neighbor picking up Shirley and Tom at the airport.  The LaScala Orchestra and Chorus, Daniel Barenboim.  It was thrilling both to watch and to hear.  It's been years since I listened to it, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how much of it I remember, having listened to it so many times in years past. There was a period in my life when I listened to it as bedtime music which, I suppose, is why I remember mainly the early movements. the Introit, Kyrie, Dies Irae, and Tuba Mirum, but also the Recordare, Jesu pie, and the gorgeous, pleading Agnus Dei, and finally, the stunning, startling Libera me.  So beautiful, I'm grateful to Verdi, to all the performers, and to modern recording technology that makes the work so available.