5/6/2026

 Wednesday, May 6, 2026

2001 During a trip to Syria, Pope John Paul II became the first pope to enter a mosque

2025 The Bundestag elects Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, as the 10th Chancellor of Germany in the second round of voting, with 325 votes out of the 316 votes necessary.

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:30; 0545 134/59/32 119 203.6; 38/50/35, sunny early, then cloudy.

Morning meds at 7:15 a.m.,with my banana bread, and a half dose of Bisoprolol at 6:20 a.m.  

Warm weather visitors: White-crowned and White-throated sparrows

I'm reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans on Kindle.  When I mentioned this to Geri last night, she told me that she was reading The Correspondent on Kindle.  If she had known I was interested, we could have 'family shared' her copy.  I sheepishly failed to add that I had purchased the Audible add-on, which I have come to really enjoy, not as a sole or primary way of getting through Kindle books, but as a very welcome supplement.  I feel a little bad about wasting some money on the second copy of the novel, but when I think of the money we spent on cigarettes in our smoking days and I spent on Zinfandel and gewurztraminer in my drinking days, I get over it quickly.  It turns out that both Geri and I are big fans of epistolary novels, though we can't claim to have read many because there aren't that many to be read.  I became a fan from during my 'monster reading' phase of life when I read RLS's Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, (1886),Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, (1818), and notably, Bram Stoker's epistolary Dracula (1897).  It followed my heroic saga phase when I read Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, The Nibelungenlied, and The Iliad.  Geri became a fan from reading and seeing the film 84 Charing Cross Road, which I also saw but did not read.  I also read and enjoyed C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (1942), a series of letters from the senior devil Screwtape to his junior tempter Wormwood.  Just thinking about these past reading pleasures makes me want to read them again.  

Back to The Correspondent, I'm only about 10% into the novel so far but I'm enjoying it greatly.  It reminds me of a period in my life after the 13 years during which my father and I never spoke to each other or saw each other when we reconnected, and I wrote him a letter every single day and flew or drove down to Florida to visit him 4 times a year.  I suppose the daily letter-writing was a crazy thing to do, just as our not speaking to each other for 13 years was a crazy thing to do, but we were clearly crazy men, or I suppose more accurately, deeply-injured men for years.  Eventually of course I persuaded him to leave his lonely life in Floriday and come to live with us in Wisconsin and with Kitty and Jim in Arizona so we enjoyed a few years of daily togetherness until he died at age 86 in 2007.

Again, back to The Correspondent,  I just finished a letter that  Sybil Van Antwerp wrote to Joan Didion on November 14, 2012, about the death of Sybil's son Gilbert 39  yearss before at age 8 and that includes this:

There is an articulation of life one hears again and again.  People will say, 'oh, this is only a season.' You know what I am referring to, don't you?  I mean how if someone is in difficulty they'll say 'it's only a season.'  Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season -- a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!) -- and the season will change eventually to something sunnier.  I take issue with this.  There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year.  As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round.  We are born and grow through childhood in spring.  We live those glorious, lively, intreting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer.  We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic.  And in winter we age (brutally) and die.  One turn of the seasons per person, unless it's cut short, like it was for Gill . . .  I suppose, on this schedule, we'd say your John had made it to Fall.  My mother died in her summer.

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction.  By and large a lonesome walk out in the wilderness of hills and wind.  Mountains. Snow. And soetimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.  Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years.  I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn't know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt. . . . [M[y point is I tire of people speaking of season as if you can count on three months of winter turning out three months of summer on repeat.  It's not so.  The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, . . . .

I was struck by her metaphors comparing our lives from birth to death to the four meteorological seasons and a long walk in one direction with only occasional comforting stopovers.  At age 73, she sees herself in the winter of her life when "we age (brutally) and die."  We learned in an earlier letter that she is losing her eyesight and that, just as the novel began, she had a temporary "black out" that caused her to crash and total her Cadillac.  This view of herself explains in large part her prickly, not-very-pleasant view of life.  She's not a terribly likable person, to put it mildly.  She seems to have a pretty bleak view of life and especailly of old age, seeing no benefits to it offsetting its many detriments.  Is 'bitter' the right word for her, or is that too harsh?  I should find out as I read more.

I was particularly struck by her statement that she had one of those comforting "stopovers" on her one-way road of life when her children  were young and "when Daan and I were happy" because I have long thought that the period when my Sarah and Andy were still little children was the happiest time of my life, though it was a time of consdierable unhappiness for Anne, who yearned to get out of the house and return to the workplace.  I can't think of any time that came closer though I suppose second place would clearly go to the period when I was so deeply enthralled in my First True Love, until she dumped me when I returned from a couple of months of active duty in the Navy.