5/7/2026

 Thursday, May 7, 2026

1824 Beethoven's 9th (Choral) Symphony premier in Vienna, Austria

1945 Unconditional surrender of the German Third Reich to the Allies was signed by General Alfred Jodl at Reims in northern France

1975 US President Gerald Ford declared an end to the "Vietnam Era."

1984 $180m out-of-court settlement was reached in the Agent Orange suit

2020 Father and son were arrested for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, after video of the killing surfaced

2025 133 cardinals began the process of electing a new pope following the death of Pope Francis

In bed at 9:30, and up at 4:20; 0500 149/66/31 121 205.2; 34/28/52/34, sunny early, then a cloudy day, Frost advisory

Morning meds at 6:30 a.m., and Bisoprolol at 5:35 a.m.

Back in town and at our feeders this morning

I'm only a quarter of the way into The Correspondent, and it is already triggering a host of thoughts, memories, and sensitivities in me.  While resting before turning on my blood pressure device this morning, I read Sybil's Christmas 2013 letter to her brother Felix in which she tells him that her son Bruce gave her as a Christmas present a program to analyze her DNA and tell her about her origins.  Since her childhood, she has known she was adopted at age 14 months.  Unlike brother Felix, she has never tried to discover the identities of her birth parents and the circumstances that led to the adoption.  It is very clear, however, that she is sensitive about it, very sensitive.  She wrote to Felix that

. . . I am not like you.  I have been content. (Of course it occurs to me from time to time, at odd times really, like a little bruise, why would someone give up a child?  A newborn I can certainly understand.  A thing someone decided before the notion of a baby became an actural baby.  But a child of fourteen months, what could possess a person to do that?  These are thoughts that I've had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I'd press on every once in a while.

She doth protest too much, for later in the letter she wrote

Perhaps they want to know, for their own sakes, now with their father at death's door.  Sentimentality? Half Belgian elite, half WHO THE HELL KNOW, PROBABLY TRAILER TRASH. I'm embarassed to admit this, but I was doing my best to held back tears.  I was angry, on display like a fool!  I'm very close to the end of my life, Felix, almost there, and I don't want to muck it up more than I already have.  I do not want to know.  I am perfectly content.

In a later letter to a Customer Service rep at the DNA service, she says "I have decided to send in my spit to see what kind of a mutt I am." 

I am wondering why she says, at age 73, that she is very close to the end of her life and sympathetic to her wish "not to muck it up more than I already have."  In any event, though, it seems clear that she is not 'perfectly content.'

I am reminded of course of my nephew Michael who was adopted by my sister Kitty and her husband Jim through Catholic Charities in Cook County so many years ago.  He was told that he was adopted when he was a child and, at least up to the time of Kitty's death 3 years ago, he never took steps to learn of his birth parents, always professing that Kitty and Jim were all the parents he wanted or needed.  Whether that remained the case, I don't know.  But I was also reminded of Kitty and me both wondering, when we were children, whether we were really our father's child - wondering how he could really be our father and yet so very unloving of us, so rejecting.  It wasn't until we were both in old age and starting each day chatting with each other that we shared with our childhood doubts about our paternity.  I thought only I had the doubt and she thought only she did.

I was also struck by Sybil's not wanting to muck up her life more than she already had.  What a lot of regret seems to be packed into that thought and, at almost age 85, I certainly 'relate to' that.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

 I'm reminded of the man leaving Sendik's in front of me awhile back with the T-shirt that reminded me: Every person you encounter is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

The deeper I get into her correspondence, the more Sybil reminds me of my former partner, Anne, who in turn reminds me a bit of Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan's speech writer and now my favorite Wall Street Street Journal columnistl. Both are very bright woman, wordsmiths, with at least a hint of well-deserved  superciliousness about them, but like all the rest of us referred to on that T-shirt at Sendik's, each surely fighting battles we know nothing about.  Sybil has two female long-term friends, Trudy and Millie, whom she calls 'the birds', reminding me of Anne and her long-term buddies who refer to themselves as "the three Graces."😊

Another passage in the book that caught my attention and resonated (ugh!) with me was in a letter Sybil wrote to a high school student who had interviewed her for a school assignment.  The student was surprised that Sybil had her collection of years of correspondence with all sorts of people whereas the student said she had never written a letter and wouldn't know how to write one, or to whom, or what to say, etc.  Among her responses, Sybil wrote: "An email can in no way replace a written letter.  It does concern me that one day all the advancement of technology will do away with the post, but I hope to be dead and gove long before that."  It reminded me the day of the handwritten, personal letter from one human being to another is perhaps (or probably) already gone.  I wrote (actually, printed) a 2 page letter to my grandson Peter yesterday forwarding a birthday gift to him.  I'm waiting for Andy to deliver it to him probably tomorrow when Peter comes home for his dormitory.  I handwrote another longer letter to him on the occasion of his religious confirmation, but I suspect they may the only somewhat lengthy, handwriten letters that he ever receives, something thought out, more than just a note inside a Hallmark card.  And, how often did Jimmy Aquavia and I share the view that we were glad we would be dead before certain "progreses" occur, progress like driveless vehicles, and artifical intelligence generally.  Is this journal I've kept now for almost 4 full years just a form of writing letters to myself?  A lonely old guy talking to himself now that he's outlived most of his family and best friends?

I watched a short interview of Fran Liebowitz on YouTube the other day.  In it, she described Donald Trump as having such having such a degree of "moral squalor" that even his fellow New York land developers look down on him.  I recall my brother-in-law Jim Aquavia, who spent almost his entire career structuring high-value real estate investments for Prudential Life Insurance Company, saying that no insurance company would do business with Trump.  I  had these thoughts when I read my comments on this journal/blog a year ago:

Boor, lout, thug, brute, lummox, pig, moron, vulgarian, sadist, charlatan, rapist, conman, fraudster, fascist,  lowlife, liar, pagan, narcissistic, avaricious, and seditious,    What a wealth of words there is to describe the curent president of the United States of America.  I thought of what a vile, despicable human being he is as I watched his Oval Office Q and session with Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, yesterday.  Trump has had the office redecorated with a lot of gold features on the walls and the fireplace.  He has given the room a cheesy, over-the-top, Mar-a-Lago look.  His former chief of staff, John Kelly, said of him: "The depths of his dishonesty just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else.  He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”   He also called him "unhinged." Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state, called him "a moron."  James Mattis, his first secretary of defense, said he has "the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader."  Other former high-ranking aides are reported to have called him "an idiot" and "like an 11-year-old."  But it's not so much his IQ that is a national embarrassment as it is his moral character and boorishness. his churlishness, his uncouthness, his classlessness and vulgarity, his lack of decency and respectability.  As I watched him seated next to Mark Carney yesterday, I envied the Canadians for having a political leader and head of state with class and dignity, unlike ours.  

 

 

Text to CBG: 

Hi, Sweetie.  I’ve been thinking this morning about how you have gotten me back into reading books again and how grateful I am for that.  I’m into “The Correspondent” now and finding that it’s triggering the same kinds of reflections I had reading Theo of Golden.  I suspect you’ve already read it but if not, I think you would find it interesting.  Saturday will be our 39th anniversary which has me marveling that Geri and I have spent the last half of our long lives together.  Sunday will be a big day for you and her both and I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day.  I’m scheduled for a catheter ablation at the VA hospital on 6/15 which has me more than a little anxious, but otherwise I’m reading up a storm and feeling pretty good. I hope all is well with you and Dan and your wonderful family.❤️. 

 

A year ago today I wrote the following in this journal: "I can't remember the last book I read cover to cover.  I get mooks but only read parts of them.   Part of it is old age and lackl of energy to engage in close reading, maybe lack of interst too.  A small part of it may be my difficulty reading, which I hope will be cured by my cataract surgery on Friday."  Actually, a lot of my problem was my difficulty reading and it was helped a lot by the cataract surgery.  Also I was only reading heavy nonfiction, like Yeshua Liebowitz and Reinhold Niebuhr.  Since Caren led me to read and discuss Theo of Golden, I've read not only that, but that author's memoir about his brother, The Idiot and Notes from Underground by Dostoevski, This is Happiness by Niall Williams, The Solace of Empty Spaces by Gretel Ehrich, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, A Portrait of the Artish as a Young Man by James Joyce, and now The Correspondent.   Part of this resurgence of reading is attributable to using Kindle with Audible.  When my eyes lose focus, I listen instead of reading.  The listening experience reminds me of listening to the radio when I was a kid.  Of course, if I limit myself to books on Kindle with Audible, I'll be eschewing a ton of good books, but one step at a time.

I replaced the seed cakes this afternoon and put out 2 orange halves, hoping to attract more orioles and other migrators.  The white-crowned sparrows showed up right away, but on the ground, as usual, along with a very dark brouwn, heavily-striped bird of unidentifiable species - finch, sparrow, siskin???  Actually, I think it's a female rose-breasted grosbeak.  And, SUCCESS! The oriole is back, feasting on the orange in the tray feeder.  The rose-breasted grosbeak has also returned.

It's an odd but wonderful time of year here.  I looked down the street as I returned to the house after doing my bird feeder chores and noticed what a beautiful vista was before me, a buenavista.  I mean the trees in our block.  some are now in blossom while others are leafing out and yet others have hardly begun, but they are all beautfiul.  I'm often sturck by the beauty of the the trees all around us.