Tuesday, August 11, 2026
1919 Green Bay Packers football club was founded by George Calhoun and Curly Lambeau - named after their sponsor, the Indian Packing Company
1954 Formal peace treaty ended over 7 years of fighting in Indochina between the French and the Communist Viet Minh
1984 During a radio voice test, US President Reagan joked that he "signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in 5 minutes."
2022 AG Merrick Garland said he personally approved the FBI search of Trump's property on the same day a Washington Post source said the FBI search was for missing documents on nuclear weapons
2025 Trump placed the District of Columbia police under federal government control and ordered 800 National Guard troops to enter Washington, D.C., allegedly to fight rising crime rates. review
In bed at 9:35, up at 6:15; 0630 116/72/62 116 203.2; 68/78/67, rainy conditions expected between 10 and 3. It's a foggy morning in Bayside town.
Morning meds at 11:30 a.m. Eliquis at 6:45 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.
I'm sure I first encountered these lines by William Wordsworth when I was in high school, when I didn't particularly like it. I still don't particularly like the poem except for these lines and the seventh line - "The Child is Father to the Man." I thought of it, however, when I looked out my window after dinner yesterday and saw a young father pushing a baby buggy along Wakefield Court. He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and a white baseball cap on the warm evening. I more commonly see young mothers, or sometimes grandparents, strolling with babies or young children, but I see a good number of fathers as well. Sometimes the kids are on scooters or being pulled in a wagon. I suppose they remind me of the happy days half a century ago when I would walk my children down Newberry Boulevard to the Lake Park pavilion on weekend mornings, or when I would take them to playgrounds in Back Bay Park or Cathedral Park. Or when I would take Sarah out with our cameras on a photography expedition to the Milwaukee harbor area or some other interesting, off-the-road venue. In any case, my heart does indeed leap up when I behold young children. I've written about this a few times in these pages. I suppose the sight of young children, or of children with their young parents, reminds me that life goes on, and that, for most of the world, life is very much worth living, despite my senescent, octogenarian pessimism about the nation and the world. Alas, I have become too like Ebenezer Scrooge in my closing years, mumbling Bah, humbug! when I should be shouting Alleluia! I forget the truth in how Kate Bowler, suffering from advanced cancer in her mid-30s, remonstrated with an older friend who complained to her of the indignities of old age: "Old age is a fucking privilege!"
On the other hand 😓, regarding my geriatric pessimism, two articles (really many more) in this morning's newspapers give me shivers. The first is "America Is Atomizing: A nation of us versus them and them and them" by Jesse McKinley in the New York Times. The other is an editorial board opinion in The Washington Post, "When America’s budget will break, disastrously," about our inexorably growing national debt. I read these pieces with eyes that have seen where the country has been heading over the last several decades, especially in our current Trump era, and I despair for our grandchildren, and even our children. My generation is like the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
[The photo above is of Sarah, fully equipped for one of our photo outings, with my Uncle Bud's 35 mm. Agfa camera that he brought back from Germany after the Big War, her camera bag, etc. I suspect that her dramatic sunglasses may reflect me taking the photo with one of my early Nikon 35 mm cameras, in those days before digital cameras and iPhones took over most of the photography world. Sarah's interest in photography has continued throughout her life. She has long been an expert technical and artistic photographer.]
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