1/15/2026

 Thursday, January 15, 2026

D+71

1973 US President Richard Nixon suspended all US offensive action in North Vietnam

In bed at 10, up at 6:10.  15/1/23/14.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at  a.m.

Text to Kitty on this date in 2023:

Hi, Sweetie -

      It’s your big brother, the ‘bad penny,’  back again.  You can’tget rid of me.

      We had more excitement in Beertown today.  After I finished enjoying my second bowl of cabbage borscht this afternoon, I got a call from Andy saying THEIR MINIVAN WAS STOLEN, once more on the street outside of St. Peter and Paul rectory, where Anh had been working on some projection in connection with his job with the archdiocese.  UNBELIEVABLE!  Andy had to pick up Drew after school at his grammar school and pick up Lizzy at the middle school, so he asked if I could pick up Ahn at St. Peter & Paul, which, of course, I did.  She had just finished making her report to the Milwaukee cops who responded to her call.  The cop told her that hers was the 128th car theft in the City of Milwaukee THAT DAY, i.e., today alone, in the middle of the afternoon.  Last year, there were more than 10,000 auto thefts in Milwaukee, mostly KIAs and HYUNDAIs, because they are so easy to jump start (“hot wire”) and steal.  When I dropped her off at home, I told her to let me know if I can help.  I’m not looking forward to another long-term car borrowing but that may be temporarily necessary.  My Volvo is a 4-door sedan and they really need a minivan with their 3 kids and their occasional trips, including skiing and other activities that require some space to hold stuff.  I’ve got several thousand dollars in that “rainy day” joint checking account that I set up for Andy and me.  It looks like this may be the “rainy day.”  One nice aspect of this really regrettable crime is that I got to spend the long drive from Sts. Peter & Paul talking with Anh, just the two of us.  I am grateful for the opportunity.

     Anh told me Sarah will be in town next week for Anne’s 80th birthday.  I’m a little surprised I haven’t received a message from Sarah about the visit.  I’m hoping Andy may host a dinner or other gathering where we’ll all get together, as we did for my 80th birthday.  We’ll see.

     My borscht turned out OK, not great, but OK.  I like a nice cabbage soup, especially in the Winter.  Maybe it will get better after calling overnight.  We’re hoping for a good weekend for you.❤️🙏❤️

 Kitty died on March 3, 2022, but she wasn't able to respond to my daily text messages after the end of November, 2021, with the following exceptions.  I.received a  very short text on Christmas, 2021, and another one on December 14:

Good morning, again, Sweetheart.  I just wanted to let you know that the name of Sarah’s YouTube channel, to which you can subscribe, is “Insight Bakery.”  So far she has 13 subscribers, including me and her mother.❤️❤️❤️

Kitty Reck:  I have no clue how that works.  Do you join  I order to  see  what  she’s up  to ? I’m really out of it. iOS I just fell and mbrole the skin on my elbow.’  Did Andy get his car back yet?z

Charles Clausen:  OMG it’s so great to hear from you!!!!!  You have to get on to YouTube on your iPad and in the search (or whatever) box, type in Insight Bakery.  That will pull it up, then you click on the “Subscribe” button.

I’m so sorry you fell.  Dangerous to walk without help nearby?  And no, Andy is still waiting for his car, over a month now.  Unbelievable.❤️

On December 1, in response to a long text I sent her, she texted me: "You and Geri are very important to me." and on December 3rd, she replied to my text with a big heart emoji.  As I write these words and look back on those text messages, I wonder why I didn't call her every day.  Was it because I knew she was so weak, too weak to communicate?  I was getting fairly regular texts from her hospice nurse, Kelly, and from my niece Chrissi.  It was a long, slow process of dying, aided and perhaps hastened by hospice-provided morphine.  She deserved an easier death.

I suppose I shouldn't look back on those last days, but I probably will, since I think of her regularly anyway, and those text messages were, in a sense, the start of my journaling, a process of writing with no firm expectation that what I wrote would be read, or would trigger any response.  She deserved an easier death.  I started to write that she deserved a better life, but stopped because she lived a very good life, full of loving acts for a great many others, including me.   It was as she lay dying and unable to communicate that my life took a steeper downward trajectory.  She and Geri were my best friends and I was losing the one who shared my childhood with me.

I was reminded of Kitty while watching Wild Strawberries.

Wild Strawberries.  In one scene in the car, when Isak and Marianne were alone, Marianne told Isak how cold and unloving he was.  Isak retorted that he had permitted Marianne to stay with him for the last two weeks.  She asked him to remember what he said when he allowed her to stay.  He didn't, and she told him: "Don't expect me to get involved in your marital problems with Evald.  It's none of my business.  Maybe you need to get in touch with a psychiatrist or a minister."  It reminded me of Kitty's telling me of the day she and her young husband Jim moved into the basement flat of the building in which my father and mother lived on the second floor.  My father said to her something like "You stay in your flat, and we'll stay in ours.  We're not living together."  It was part of a lifetime of experiences with him that led her to believe, probably correctly, that he was jealous of both of us for the love our mother had for us, that he viewed us as competitors in a zero-sum game for our mother's love.  I wish I could remember the exact words as Kitty related them to me, and the exact words that Marianne repeated to Isak, but whatever they were, they were cruel, cold, and literally off-putting.  It's hard to blame all of my Dad's bad behavior toward his children on his PTSD after Iwo Jima, just as it's hard to blame Isak's coldness to his son and his daughter-in-law on his parents' coldness toward him.  The movie raises the question of our personal responsibility for our own bad behavior in life - determinism, free will, sin, and all that - and reminded me of Ed Felsenthal and Cam Wakeman both telling me of my own 'aloofness' in our college days, about which I've written before.

Cardiology Clinic.  3 problems: heart fauilure, Bradycardia, and extra beats.  I have been referred to a heart rhythm specialist cardiologist for the second and third.  Medication changes for the first, plus big dietary changes.

Geri's off to Alexandria to visit Jimmy, Katherine, and Jordan.