4/15/2026

 Wednesday, April 15, 2026

My Mom's 104th birthday

1922 Mary Norma Healy was born in Grand Rapids, MN

In bed at 10 during a raging thunderstorm, up at 4:40 to quiet.  0445 124/66/32 117 204.0; 62/66/52, cloudy.

Morning meds at 9:30 a. m.  Ranolazine at 8 a.m. and p.m.

Wild night of thunder, lightning, and dense rainfall.  The rain started falling after Geri had shut the venitian blinds for the night.  When I opened them to look out on the storm, the air looked like it was solid water, like we were underwater in a submarine.  We went downstaira twice to check the basement, and each time we had a little rain seepage coming in from the window well areas on our west wall.   These increasingly common storms reminds us how dependent we are on technilogical services, especially electric power and internet, which is to say, how vulnerable we are to technology.  I think of this vulnerability today as I read of threats being traded by Trump and the Iranian regime.  Does Trump think the Iranians are without power in cyberwarfare?  or in old-fashioned terrorism, suicide bombers, 'dirty bombs', etc.?  Am I crazy for thinking it is not impossible to imagine the Iranians doing something particularly destructive within the U.S. and Trump responding with a nuclear weapon?  Is that sort of thing beyond the realm of the possible?  I don't think so.   More severe storms expected this afternoon, evening, and night.  I dread it.  Fox Point, our next door neighbor to the south, got 2.88 inches of rain last night. and I suppose we received something like that.  Today and tonights storms will be Day 3 in a row, with at least another inch of rain predicted.  Fingers crossed.

FB today.  Mary Norma Healy was born 100 years ago today in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at the south end of the Mesabi Iron Range.  1922 was the year that saw Hitler’s Brownshirts, the SA, becoming violent in the streets of Germany on their long march to power 10 years later.  It was the year that 30,000 of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome and seized control over the Italian government.  Mary was born just a few months after Crown Prince Hirohito became Regent of Japan on his way to becoming Emperor of Japan in 1926 and just a few weeks before Frances Gumm, later to be better known as Judy Garland, was born in the same hospital as Mary.  Mary’s mother, Catherine O’Shea Healy, had two other children, Cornelius and Donald, and had had a third son, Daniel, who died at birth or in infancy, for Mary’s birth registry listed her as Catherine’s fourth child.  In 1928, when Mary was 6 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production.  Her father never remarried and Mary grew up motherless.  Mary was 7 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and she lived most of her youth in the Great Depression.  She attended Catholic schools in Englewood on Chicago’s south side and on August 3, 1940, she married Charles Edward Clausen, a co-parishioner at St. Bernard’s Church.  She was 18 years old, he several weeks shy of his 20th birthday.  In August of 1941, she gave birth to her son Charles and 3 years later, to his beloved sister, Catherine, named after Mary’s mother, and always called by her nickname Kitty.  In 1944, her husband was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to kill or be killed by Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers on a small island called Iwo Jima.  Her brothers were likewise conscripted and sent off to kill or be killed by the soldiers of Hitler and Mussolini.  Charles survived the battle, unlike 6,800 other Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese who died on the island, but he returned to his young wife emotionally shattered, damaged in ways that lasted throughout his life.  In September, 1947, a 15 year old neighbor of Mary and Charles, broke into their basement apartment while Charles was at work, threatened Mary’s 6 year old son and 3 year old daughter with a knife, and  slashed and sexually assaulted Mary.  The investigating detective described the crime as ‘sexual torture.’ Mary survived the crime against her and her children and, though she suffered her own PTSD, she never allowed herself to become embittered by the many hurts and injuries she experienced in her life.  Like her mother, she died young, at age 51.  Her husband and her daughter are gone now too, and her son is in his 80s.  He remembers her today on what would be her 100th birthday for the love and kindness she shared with a world that so often abused and neglected her, for the love and loyalty she gave to family and friends, for the compassion she showed for all of ‘our fellow men,’ and for the strength and integrity and goodness with which she lived her too-short and too-hard life. Requiescat in pace, Mom.

The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich.  I finished this collection of essays today.  They were all about life in Wyoming - mmotly the the lives of sheepherders, ranchers, and cowboys.  It was published in 1985 and I cant imagine how life in Wyoming may have changed, or not, over the last 40 years.  I was pleased to be instructed and reminded how very many people live lives so very different from the life I have lived growing up in Chicago, indoctrinated by the Church I grew up in and by the military that influenced me for the first 10 years of my early adulthood, and being a lawyer and a law professor for most of my adult life.  How different other lifes are from the lives I experienced among my neighbors at the House of Peace.  On the other hand, I was very put off by the author's writing style.  Much of what she wrote I didn't understand which might just be because of my not-too-bright mind and my poor comprehension, but it struck me that she was always trying too hard to be poetic and original.  I suppose that's understandable since she has published two books of poetry, but it was a big turnoff for me.  I'm surprised that publishers found the essays worthy of publication in book, Kindle, and Audible forms, but, on the other hand, I bought it, read (and listened) to it till the last page.  'nuf said.