6/7/2026

 Sunday, June 7, 2026

1965 The Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut, effectively legalizing the use of contraception by married couples

2020 John Prine died

In bed at 8:30, up at 4:30; 0445 145/85/54 111 203.2, 0500 124/81/55;  55/68/55, mostly cloudy today.

Morning meds at a.m., and half-dose of bisoprolol at 5:45.  

LTMW around 6:30 a.m., I see a small bird of unknown species stuffing its little beak full, and then some, with cotton from the big cotton ball we have hanging above the suet cake on a shepherd's crook.  I wonder whether he or she has eaten already, or rather it is taking care of its nest building business first.  Today I need to replace the suet cake and add one or two seedcakes to the seedcake stack.  I'll also add some safflower seeds to the tray feeder because there are hardly any left on it, only black-oil sunflower seeds.  On the other hand, I've been wondering lately whether I want to keep attracting so many mourning doves to this feeder since they tend to 'hog the show.'  They are much larger than the finches, sparrows, chickadees, and bluebirds who also like to feed there, and the doves tend to 'set up shop' on the feeder.  They tend to roost on the feeder after they finish feeding.  Sometimes their presence doesn't deter the smaller birds from feeding, but sometimes they do.  They are not as non-aggressive as they look and sound.  Indeed, some of them get pretty nasty, even and perhaps especially toward other doves. . . At 11:30, I witnessed some mighty lascivious courting behavior between two house finches.  Mrs. Finch was imitating Lydia Lust, the girl with the bust, from the original Bedazzled film. 

We replaced a couple of shepherd crooks yesterday with a new, 'two-winged' crook from Bayside Gardens.  I drove there with Geri in mid-afternoon.  I was feeling the symptoms of my heart failure and PVCs and had kind of a hard time walking from the car to where the shepherd crooks were located.  Light-headedness and SOB.  I had to hold on to Geri at one point.  While waiting for Geri to pick out the one she wanted, I struck up a conversation with a young couple who had only recently moved to Wisconsin and north shore Milwaukee.  It turned out that the young wife was from Chicago, Morgan Park, and that her uncle went to Leo High School.  When Geri and I checked out with our new shepherd's crook, we were shocked at its cost: $52!    If the price had been marked on it, Geri never would have bought it, but we went through with the purchase.  We are both astounded at today's cost-of-living, or, as it's now called, the 'affordability crisis.'  I notice it especially at the grocery markets, but it is widespread: health insurance, housing, automobiles, seemingly everything, including shepherd crooks.   I hope this situation helps anti-Trump candidates in the mid-term elections in November, but I suspect the affordability problem won't be cured by any political election.  We'll see (if I'm still around to see it.)

Cardiac symptoms.  I told my NP Maggie Angeli, when I saw her on May 28th, that my symptoms were getting worse, specifically the SOB and lightheadedness.  They continue to be troubling.  I was short of breath while waiting for my coffee to drip through the paper filter this morning, leading me to think again of how I don't like living like this.  I have SOB doing simple kitchen tasks.  I stopped to catch my breahth halfway from our TV room to my bedroom.  Not good.  It makes me think of my sister and her COPD and has me wondering about her final months, weeks, and days.  I feel again the pain and shame about not being with her in her last days.  Knowing of the morbidity of my heart, the heart failure and 30% PVCs, I'm more conscious of the possiblity of heart attack, or perhaps more likely cardiac arrest, at any given moment, out of the blue like TSJ's floating in the warm water of the Carribean.  Or of RHF's.  If it should happen, of coure, it would be a blessing, at least compared to so many other ways of leaving "this vale of tears,"  

"Success," wealth, identity, belonging.  I finished Anything is Possible this morning.  The last two chapters/stories are about the Blaine children, Dottie and Abel.  It is surprising to me that Elizabeth Strout writes so much about poor people, or more particularly, about poor children and how their poverty during childhood affects them in their adult lives.  Her main focus is on Lucy Barton and her siblings Pete and Vicki, but she also pays attention to their cousins, Dottie and Abel.  This group of 5 cousins grew up together, at least in part, and inevitably they remind me of my sister and me and our 3 cousins, Jimmy, Christine, and Dougie.  We were working-class people.  Neither of my parents graduated from high school during the Great Depression.  My mother worked most of her life as a waitress, and my father bounced (or more accurately, was bounced) from one job to another after the Big War.Jimmy, Christine, and Dougie had only one parent, their mother, our Aunt Monica, who was a long-distance operator for Illinois Bell Telephone Company.  Their father was "Scottie" Cummings, an Errol Flynn look-alike and, I suspect, a womanizer.  We never knew him as Monica's husband and our cousins' father.  I was the only one of the boys to graduate from high school.  Jimmy and Dougie both attended De La Salle high school, but quit before graduation to join the Navy.  Kitty graduated from Visitation high school, and I can't recall whether Christine graduated from her "secretarial" high school.  

Were we poor, or just (very) lower-middle class, working people?  Aunt Monica and the kids lived off her income as a telephone operator, but only because they lived in the lower of the two-flat which her parents owned, and in which the parents occupied the upper.  They never had a car.  We had a car, but lived in the roach-infested basement flat and relied mainly on my mother's paltry income as a waitress.  We sometimes didn't have enough cash to buy food, and had to obtain enough for meals "on the cuff" from Mr. and Mrs. Kelly's mom-and-pop dinky grocery store half a block from our apartment.  Of the five cousins, may have been the first to finish high school and the only one to attend college, thanks to the NROTC scolarship.  

I am reminded of these facts this morning because of reading of Abel Blaine's shame arising out of his marrying the boss's daughter, and rising to the highest management and ownership position in his father-in-law's company.  In the chapter/story titled "Gift", we learn that Abel had his suits custom tailored by a London tailor named Keith, and

When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. . .  But what followed this astonishment was a searing sense of shame, as though Abel had done something unsavory all those years by having Keith build his clothes.  He found himself murmuring the words out loud, when he was in his car, or alone in his office, or getting dressed in the morning. "I'm sorry.  God, I'm so sorry."

Even while he voted as a conservative, even while he took his annual bonus from the board,  . . and even while most of him thought what he had thought for years, I will not apologize for being rich, he did apologize, but to whom precisely he did not know.  Waves of shame would suddenly pour over him, . . . 

One of the themes Strout pursues in her writing is the sense of loneliness, or not belonging, that Lucy Barton and her cousins feel from having grown up in such straightened circumstances (to put it mildly) and having ended up solidly middle class and "successful."  The sense was intensified by the knowledge that Pete and Vicki Barton had not "succeeded."  This is illustrated in the stories "Dottie's Bed and Breakfast,'  and "Gift," but mostly stunningly in "Sister."  It reminded me of course of myself, the feeling of "not belonging" among my higher class friends and roommates in college, nor of belonging anymore to my lower class roots.

I've included in these reflections the photo of Aunt Monica and the 5 cousins taken  in the parking lot of the Family Table restaurant on September 9, 2000, my Dad's 80th birthday ,in North Port. Florida.  It's a bittersweet memory for me.  First because Monica, Kitty, and Christine have all died, and second, because reveals the very close and affectionate relationship we all had and that we had gathered together for the first time in years to celebrate that birthday, but I can't forget that on our as we drove out of the parking lot, Jimmy and Dougie had a nasty fight and that Dougie ended up in the Sarasota County jail that night.  Jimmy and I bailed him out the next day.  Our complicated family.  What complicated families so many of us have.  Many?  Most?  All?  What complicated people we all are.  Good novels remind us of this and Elizabeth Strout, I have learned, writes good novels - not heavy on plot, but heavy on character development.

I started reading another Strout novel, Oh, William, the third in the Lucy Barton series.  I hope to read it and the next in the series, Lucy by the Sea before taking a break and moving to some other author.  I am enjoying Strout a lot but she's a heavy read precisedly because she gets heavily into heavy themes: loneliness, guilt and shame, class, lack of communication among people, even or especially intemates, etc.  She reminds us of our own frailties though not without also reminding us of the possibility of and power of love and kindness in our lives.   She reminds me too that every human being is unique, "as common as a field daisy, and as singular," and that each of us has a story of our own complications, of own vices and virtues, our own relationships with our own parents and siblings and others.  Some express this reality by saying each of us is a "child of God" or some such metaphor.  For some of us, the metaphor says too much, but it's thinking of individuals as ordinary, or not in some way holy or sacred or venrable that made Auschwitz possible, and Hiroshima

Geri has been doing heavy duty gardening for days on end.  We've been blessed with favorable weather and she has taken advantage of every day.  It's hard for me to believe she is 82 years old as I watch her bending and lifting and digging and uprooting and raking and pulling or pushing her garden carts all over our .62 acre lot.  What a woman.   

I'm struck by how many good friends she has.  She is on the phone now with a good friend who lives in Topeka, KS, Rita Burns.  She talks regualrly with good friends who live in Ridgefield, CN;Dublin, Ireland; Pittsburgh & Florida; Urbana, IL.   Who am I missing?  While working in the front yard gardens today, her friends Shirley (born in and immigrated from Hong Kong), and Barbara, a walking and Temple Emanuel knitting volunteer buddy,, stopped and chatted.  She talks with her sons and daughters-in-law regularly.  She talks with her granddaughter regularly.  I seem to have misspent my life, ending up a semi-recluse.