3/7/2026

 Saturday, March 7, 2026

1965 Alabama state troopers and 600 black protesters clashed in Selma during "Bloody Sunday," protester and future congressman John Lewis was beaten and hospitalized

2025  All trains running through the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris, including Eurostar trains from London and Brussels, were canceled due to the discovery of a World War II unexploded ordnance containing 240 lbs. of explosives near the rail tracks near the station. 

2025  Convicted murderer Brad Sigmon was executed by firing squad in South Carolina 

In bed at 9:45, up at 5:25, but on the LZB from 2:15 to 3:35, sleepless.  36/58/36  117/61/57 125 207.2

Morning meds at  a.m.   

From ch. 14 of This is Happiness:

I knew where Christy's mind was, or thought I did, until he held the second cigarette out from him and said, "The morning I turned sixty I was in a boarding house in Boston.  I wa lying in the bed and was gifted one clear, cold realisation, like a glass of spring water.'

I didn't ask what it was.

'You've still time, Christy.  You've still time to go back and right all the mistakes you've made. That's what it was.'  He looked at me, his face lit as if he had won a prize.

On that morning, he had become possessed by a single idea, simple and fantastical both, and he had set out on a personal crusade to make what amends he could, and this was what had brought him to Faha.

I didn't know what to say.  My first thought was: he is a simpleton. Or, in Doady's vocabulary, a dudaire.  It was absurd, naive, childish, and sentimental.  You can't correct the mistakes of a lifetime.  You are your own past.  These things happen, you did them, you have to accommodate them inside your skin and go forward.  Even if you could - and you couldn't, cant - there was no going back.  Something like this was running through my mind.

Christy watched the smoke, there, and not there.  'I am resolved on a career of reparation,' he said.

'And have you?  Made amends?'

'It is one of the tragedies of life, that life keep getting in the way of good intentions.  I've made some.  I'll make more."

 I looked away and left him eating the purple tulips of memory.

'Annie Mooney,' he said after a time. 

 Annie Mooney was the widow of the Faha pharmacist.  She was also a love interest from his earlier life.  "For her I once ate a dozen purple tulips," he earlier told the book's protagonist and narrator, Noel Crowe.  I don't have a clue how Christy's crusade and quest will turn out; I'm only a third of the way through the novel, but the story of a lost love captures my interest because of my own history with my First True Love, Charlene Wegge of Longwood Academy and St. Thomas More parish on Chicago's South Side.  I never ate even a single tulip for her, but she broke my heart when she dumped me in the summer of 1960 when I returned from two months at sea on active duty in the Navy Reserve.  Is it hyperbole to say that the shock and heartache of that event stayed with me for the rest of my life?  I think not.  It's now more than 65 years later and I still remember it with some pain and hurt.  For decades now, I have wondered what happened to her, how her life played out, whether she married and had a family, and whether she is still alive.  It wasn't until I engaged in the long process of writing my memoir, 20ish years ago, that I fully realized how the wound of that long-ago event in my life had never healed.  It lurked, a hidden but open sore in my heart, ready to pop up unbidden and cause a fresh hurt at any time decades after the one she delivered  when I was 19 in 1960.  Christy had his Annie Mooney, James Gatz had his Daisy Buchanan, Gretta Conway had her Michael Furey, and I had my Charlene Wegge.  

From James Joyce's The Dead:

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. . . . He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. 

 Our good next-door neighbor, John McGregor, died last night.  He and I are/were the same age, born months apart.  He had the misfortune of contracting polio in his youth.  I was spared that and many other misfortunes.  John was spared many of mine.  The lottery of birth.  So it goes.  John was a great neighbor for 15 years and we'll miss him.   I've been blessed with some great neighbors during my life, starting with Ann and Carl Semrau, and their daughters Cathy and Rosemary.  The Semraus owned the three story triplex next door to our basement apartment at 7303 S. Emerald, and let us move into their spacious second floor flat at a time when I'm sure my father's employment history and credit rating would have been off-putting for any other landlord.  They were our friends not only in those terrible years right after the war, but the perhaps even more terrible years after James Hartman's notorious crime against my mother, Kitty and me in 1947.  (Plus, Cathy Semrau introduced me to Charlene Wegge.)   Our downstairs neighbors in Doylestown, PA, during my rough year returning from Vietnam duty were also terrific, though I can't even recall their names today.  Alas.  

Tonight, Geri had dinner with Caela and joined her at the Milwaukee Symphony, for a concert featuring Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto.  I watched a video of Yitzhak Perlman playing it on YouTube, a favorite, both the concerto and Perrlman.  I watched Glassland on MUBI.