5/17/2026

 Sunday, May 17, 2026

1954 The US Supreme Court's unanimous rule in Brown v Topeka Board of Education reversed the 1896 "separate but equal" Plessy v Ferguson decision ruling 

1977 Menachem Begin's Likud Party won election in Israel

1980 Major race riot in Miami, Florida - 16 were killed, and 300 injured

2000 We arrived in Gualdo, Italy

2025 The Supreme Court of Iran overturned a 5-year prison sentence imposed by a Tehran court against singer Amir Tataloo and confirmsed his death sentence for blasphemy. 

In bed at 9, up at 4:50; 0510 122/57/56 112 206.2;   50/42/63/50; cloudy, thunderstorms expected this afternoon.

Morning meds at 8 a.m., half-dose of Bisoprolol at 7:30 a.m.

I ended yesterday and started today reading Etgar Keret.  I like the way he writes, plain and simple.  Or is it just the translator's way of writing?  No, it must my Keret's.  Here is how he started the story "Ground Up" that I read this morning while sitting in the LZB, resting, waiting to take my blood pressure:

I have a good dad.  I'm lucky.  I know.  Not everyone has a good dad.  Last week, I went to the hospital with him for a fairly routine test, and the doctors told us that he was going to die.  He has an advanced stage of cancer at the base of his tongue.  The kind you don't recover from. 

   You can't get much more direct, plain and simple than that.  That's the way he writes and I appreciate it because very often I can't understand what I read.  It happens all the time with poetry, of course, but I blame that on the poets who often don't give a shit whether a reader understands their what they have written.  But even with prose, I often don't understand an allusion, or a metaphor, or a description.  Keret wants his readers to know exactly what he is talking about so he calls a spade a shovel rather than a spade because most of his readers think and talk in terms of shovels rather than spades.  He generally follows George Orwell’s 6 Rules for Writers from his “Politics and the English Language”:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I regularly and wilfully violate all of these rules, especially ## 3 and 5.  My good friend, law firm colleague, and volunteer editor David Branch ruthlessly reminded me that I was "wordy" whenever he edited my briefs or opinion letters.  I use too many of them and I like foreign words and phrases, especially those in Latin, German, or Yiddish.  I studied Latin for 4 years in high school and, by God, I ought to derive some benefit from all those years struggling with conjugations and declensions, regular and irregular verbs.  And there are German and Yiddish words that have no easy equivalents in English.  I like them and so I use them.  But if Keret has any tendency to use unnecessary words, he doesn't indulge it.  The doctors told us he was going to die.

Maybe I was so struck by this particular opening of a story because it reminded me instantly of the day I took my friend Roland Wright to see his doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital to learn the result of tests that had been taken.  "You have a cancer that has spread and it's going to take your life."  Those were the words the doctor spoke immediately after a 'good morning' or 'good afternoon,' I forget which.  Neither Roland nor I had been expecting to hear his death sentence at that visit, but there it was, with no mollifying niceties cushioning the shock.  Wham, bam, thank you, mam.

Roland and I had been friends for several years.  We were both members of St. Francis of Assisi parish.  I drove the church van on Sundays and holydays.  I picked up and drove home parishioners who had no other way to get to church.  Roland was my first pick-up and last drop-off.  He sat up front with me and we became good friends.  He lived a public housing, for low-income elderly,  the Convent Hill "project."  He was unmarried and I never knew how old he was.  60s? 70s?  He was a recovering alcoholic and retired from his work as a counselor in some publicly-funded program to help other alcoholics.  In his drinking days, Roland had lived with his father.  One night, when Roland was passed out from drinking, a fire occurred in their building and his father died from smoke inhalation.  Roland blamed himself for his father's death.  He believed that if he hadn't been so drunk the night of the fire, he could have gotten his father out of the building in time to save his life.  He carried the guilt and shame in his heart for the rest of his life.  

Roland's esophageal cancer meant that he couldn't swallow food.  He had a gastronomy tube, or "g-tube" placed in his abdomen and he received hourishment only through that tube.  Convent Hill had a resident nurse who also was a member of St. Francis parish and she and I took turns coming to Roland's apartment every day to grind up his medications, mix them with his protein drinks, Ensure or Boost, and pour the mixture into his stomach through the g-tube.  Eventually, Roland grew too weak to stay in his little apartment and he was moved to the nursing home at 6th and Walnut street, down the street from the House of Peace where I worked at the time, and eventually he died there.  The Convent Hill nurse (whose name I can no longer remember) and I delivered the eulogies at his funeral at St. Francis and Father Matthew Gottschalk, I, and my assistant HOP director Walter Goodwin, attended his burial.  I was given the American flag that was presented in honor of Roland's service in the Army in his young adulthood.  I still have it.

It was 2002 or 2003 when Roland died.  We were good friends.  I miss him.  As I think back on all the rides to and from church that we shared, and all the times I took him to one medical appointment or another, and all the days I visited him in his apartment in Convent Hill, to grind his meds into powder, mix them into his Ensure or Boost, and carefully feed him through his g-tube, I feel some shame that I don't mention him when I write of all the good friends I have outlived.  I probably should include Father Matthew, too, though our friendship lasted less than 3 years.  

All those memories from 25 and more years ago were triggered when I read Keret's words "and the doctors told us that he was going to die."  They took me back to that day in Mount Sinai Hospital when Roland's doctor told us the same - with no sugarcoating.  

I was reminded too of my own father's death at Thunderbird Hospital in Glendale, AZ, in 2007, and of the nurse there who told Geri and me when we arrived from Wisconsin that my my Dad wouldn't come out of his coma, that he was already brain-dead.  What I recall is only her callousness, that she gave us that information almost with an animus.  Perhaps I imagined it, but I don't think so. 

I finished Keret's The Seven Good Years this afternoon, resolved to read more of his work.