5/19/2026

 Tuesday, May 19, 2026

1961 Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev makes his Paris stage debut with the Kirov Ballet

1962 "John Birch Society" single by Chad Mitchell Trio hit the pop charts

1983 36th Cannes Film Festival: "Narayama Bushiko" (The Ballad of Narayama ) directed by Japanese director Shohei Imamura, won the Palme d'Or

1992  Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown for being a single mother, a poor example of family value

2025 Russia bansned Amnesty International as an undesirable organisation, accusing the group of openly supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.

In bed at 9:30, awake at 3:45, up at 4:15; 0430 117/69/55 108 206.2; 63/58/74/53, cloudy, and another windy day..

Morning meds at 8:30 a.m., and half-dose of Biseprolol at.5:30 a.m.

From Traveling Mercies, the essay "Ladders," p, 76-77:

Tom and I ended up going [snorkeling] together.  The little cove was near a beach with grsas huts and umbrellas on the white sands; cactuses on ancient neighboring hills framed it all.  We donned our gear and jumped in.  The water is not crystal clear, and there are not a million brilliantly colored fish to watch, but if there is a heaven - and I think there really may be one - it may be similar to snorkeling, soft, bright, quiet.   

I read this section last night before turning off the lights and going to bed.  It made me think, of course, of my old friend TSJ, who died from cardiac arrest or a heart attack while snorkeling in the US Virgin Islands.  I would never say that it was fortunate that Tom died  as he did; I'm confident that, had he been given a choice in the matter, he would have chosen to go on living.  He enjoyed life probably more than many, perhaps most, of us do.  He was a lot smarter than most people, and he liked that about himself.  He was also better looking than most of us, even in his old age, and he liked that too.  He was happy in his own skin, as they say.  He even took some pride in his family name, St. John, named after an original evangelist, or perhaps the Beloved Disciple whom Jesus loved, and this despite the fact that he was  a Jew, by conversion rather than by birth or upbringing, and the former treasurer of Congregation Sinai.  No, I'm pretty sure he would have chosen life over death if given that choice on January 18, 2023.  But he wasn't given that choice, and his 78 year old heart stopped beating as he floated in the warm Carribean waters watching the undersea creatures while his wife Micaela and son Saul, waited on their nearby boat.  That said, I've often thought that his death was an awfully nice way to go.  Better than being eaten by a shark, certainly, but also better than dying in a hospital or nursing home, especially after a long, painful, or debilitating illness.  Better than most of the ways of dying that I can think of.  I think of Tom and of his death while snorkeling in tropical waters when I consider the question asked of me before every surgery and hospitalization at the VA: do you want us to try to try to resuscitate your heart if it stops beating?  The first time I was asked, I said 'yes,' but now I say 'no', for reasons I've often reflected on in these journal pages, but basically because, considering all the dreadful alternative ways of dying, dying under anesthesia or otherwise cared for is not such a bad way to go.  One thing is certain: life will not get any easier the longer it continues past age 85.  Maybe I should book a vacation to the Virgin Islands.

Random thoughts about Anne Lamott and her God.  Traveling Mercies is the first thing I've read of her voluminous writing, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit.  I enjoy that she writes of everyday events and circumstances of living.  As I write these words, I'm in the middle of her description of living with colds, flus, and headaches, and comparing her crabbiness with her neighbor's cheerfulness despite his stage 4 metascicized lung cancer. ("Fields"). I wonder, however, about a couple of things.  First, how much of her reporting is factual and how much is made up to craft a better, or at least, more marketable story.  She's a professional writier writer, published in such worthy venues as the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, National Geo, Time, and other widely-read journals.   Her stories are crafted to be sold or otherwise accepted for publication and I suspect some, maybe much, of it is made up to make a better story.  Second, she writes a lot about God and how she prays.  I have to wonder how much of whaat she writes she really believes.  Of course, I tend to wonder about this with respect to all believers, like Reinhold Niebuhr and Thomas Merton, all clergmen, and church-goers generally - the people at the pulpits and the people in the pews.   I don't wonder about these things out of any sense of my own intellectual or spiritual superiority, to neither of which I lay any claim, but because of my own difficulty in coming up with a sense of a God, at least a personal God like the kind Lamott seems to believe in, one who is attentive to the prayers of his (or her or its) believers and supplicants here on Earth, one whose "eye is on the sparrow."  Here's a sample from the essary I'm in the middle of now:

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, "Well, isn't that fabulous?  Because I need help too.  So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I'll figure out what we're going to do about your stuff."  Maybe Rick had told God (as he understands God) that he needed some energy that morning, and God had said, "Well, great, because Sam Lamott needs a ride to school.  Could you do that for me?  And I'll be getting you some strength."

I realize of course that she is simply trying to make good points with her imagined two-way conversations with God and God's imagined conversation with Rick, but with all the imagined stuff about God in her writing, I have to wonder what she really believes, and why she believes whatever she believes.  As I write these words, though, I recall the wisest thing ever said to me about Faith, by my old friend Vicki Conti, at our last lunch together.  I was kvetching about my problems understanding the idea of God operating in our world, and Vicki said, "It's not a head thing, Chuck.  It's a heart thing."  'nuf said.  She was wise.  I'm a dope.