6/4/2026

 Thursday, June 4, 2026

1919 US Marines invaded Costa Rica

1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre: unofficial figures placing the death toll near 1,000

1990 Dr Jack Kevorkian assisted an Oregon woman to commit suicide, beginning a national debate over the right to die

1991 Pope John Paul II compared abortion with Nazi murders

2024 President Joe Biden introduced immediate restrictions on the southern border, limiting illegal migrant crossings to 2,500 a day  (Too little, too late)

2025 The United States vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, with the remaining fourteen other members voting in favor.

2025  Donald Trump signed a proclamation banning entry into the United States for nationals of 12 countries deemed "very high-risk" due to terrorist activity, hostile governments, and high visa overstay rates, while imposing additional restrictions on visitors from several others. Exemptions applied for select categories, including athletes and diplomats. 

In bed at 9:15, awake and up at 5:25; 0545 131/88/50 118 203.0;53/78/51, sunny afternoon, otherwise cloudy.      

Morning meds at 8:15 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 6:15 a.m.

Yesterday, I started reading Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton.  I was drawn to it because I enjoyed The Things We Never Say, and because I needed something new to read today and I found out that it is about a strained relationship between a mother and daughter based on the daughter’s childhood of abuse, deprivation, and poverty.  It rang a bell with me of course because of my troubled relationship with my father.  The stories have the same central theme: the impossibility of one human being really knowing another human being, even one with whom one shares a close or intimate relationship, including parent-child and husband-wife.  She has a corollary, which is that, although we know one another only imperfectly, that doesn’t mean we can’t love one another, though imperfectly.  It’s also about our lack of communication about the most important things in life.  Artie Dam asked why we never talk about things that are real, about what is going on inside us.  Lucy Barton wonders why her mother, who very clearly loves her, never tells her she loves her.  I’m moved by this latter point because it reminds me so much of my father, and not only with respect to me, but even more with respect to my little sister.   The story is also about PTSD, which Lucy’s father suffered from after WWII in Europe and my father suffered from after WWII in the Pacific.  The story is also about what Strout calls appropriately “moments of grace,” fleeting times in life when acts of kindness or connection occur between human beings.  One of the important characters in the novel is another writer (Lucy Barton is herself a writer) named Sarah Payne, who, in a workship that Lucy attended, remarked that everyone has but one story, that they tell over and over in different ways.  Elizabeth Strout clearly believes this herself and practices it in her own novels, at least based on the two I’ve read.

By the time I hit the sack last night, I had read about 85% of the novel. I started reading it again as I rested before my required morning "vitals."  Lucy Barton is a sad story - no, make that a very sad story.  For me, it has been a gut puncher though I'm not finished with it.  As I read it before taking the 'vitals,' Lucy's mother died, and a year later, her father died.  Her daughters went off to college and her marriage to her husband William ended.  Her renditions of these events are brief, concise - no, make that very brief and concise. - but almost every chapter of the novel is brief and concise, and there are 55 of them fitted into 190 pages.  She flew back to Chicago for her mother's last days in a hospital, where her mother asked her to leave.  She flew back to her childhood home (the house, not the garage) for her father's death.  Each death hit her hard but she was able to tell each parent that she loved them before they died.

When I got back to New York after seeing my father - and my mother the year before - after seeing them for the last time, the world began to look different to me.  My husband seemed a stranger, my children in their adolescence seemed indifferent to much of my world.  I was really lost.  I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us -off-kilter as we had been - was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended.  I kept thinking of my brother and my sister and the bewilderment in their faces when my father died.  I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts.  My husband said, "But you didn't even like them."  And I felt especially frightened after that.

I finished the book before Geri got up.  It affected me powerfully, because it reminded me so much of my own childhood and much of my adulthood, at least in terms of my relationship with my Dad.  He returned from the big war a wreck, profoundly unhappy and ill-fitted either to earn a living and support a family economically, or to love the small family that awaited him, or even himself.  He loved his birth family but not his marital family.  His psychological, emotional, and spiritual condition after his 21 months in the Marines and his 27 days on Iwo Jima had  devastating effects on my little sister and me, not just in our childhoods but throughout our lives.  Lucy Barton's father came back from his service in Germany during the war wrecked, ruined, haunted, much like my father returned from the Pacific.  As became clear to me in starting to read her next novel, Anything Is Possible, his wife Lydia may have been at least equally screwed up.  My sister and I, on the other hand, were singularly blessed in having a strong, loving, and supportive mother even though she endured her own Iwo Jima on September 30, 1947, when James Hartman stole into our little apartment as she, my 4 year old sister, and I lay sleeping.  [Blogger format screw-up again.]