9/4/2026

 Friday, September 4, 2026

1957 Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent 9 black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School

1970 Marxist Salvador Allende won a narrow plurality of votes in Chile's presidential election

2016 Mother Teresa was canonized by Pope Francis in a ceremony at the Vatican

2017 US President Donald Trump announces the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be stopped

In bed at 9:15, up at 5:05; 0520 205.8 116/69/59  97;  74/77/67, cloudy, thunderstorms early.

Morning meds at 5:50 a.m. and/or 2 p.m., and Entresto at 6 a.m. and p.m.  Trulicity injection at 2:30 p.m.  I may have double-dosed my morning meds today.  Memory problems, confusion.

Internet outage due to severe storm damage overnight.😡 It didn't come back on until about 3:40 this afternoon after being out since before 6 a.m.  During the severe thunderstorm this morning, I missed TV weather coverage showing the extent of the storm, its probable duration, etc.  I didn't remember to connect through my iPhone "hotspot" until sometime this afternoon, or to connect to local TV stations, MS NOW, CNN, etc.

During the outage, I made a banana bread, but I managed to screw it up in all kinds of ways.  Memory problems again, absent-mindedness, etc.

Every Effort.  Through Barbara's book, I'm learning a lot more about Bill Mullen and his buying the farm crashing in Laos.  'Buying the farm', I understand, is a term that originally arose during World War II as a euphemism for crashing a military aircraft, but it's now usually used to denote not simply crashing, but dying by crashing, especially in a military aircraft.  When Bill was shot down, there was persuasive evidence that he ejected before his A4E crashed and that he survived on the ground.  His ejection radio beeped his location, but there were no voice transmissions.  He followed instructions from a rescue aircraft, but shortly thereafter, there were no signals, leading to the belief among his squadron mates and Barbara that he and his radio had been captured.  In my memoir, I wrote:

I suspect most, perhaps all, of us thought Moon was probably dead; I did.  We may have even hoped that he was dead rather than living as a captive in a cave in a mountain in Laos or sick and abused in a jungle prison.  I don’t know what we thought because we did not talk about it.  We didn’t talk about it, but we all thought about it, about him.  We thought of him as we drank each night at the officers’ club.  We thought of him as we watched the gung ho grunts go through their training before heading south, some to die, some to lose limbs, some perhaps to be among the missing, most to return alive but many messed up in their heads and hearts to one degree or another.  

I'm chastened to re-read my words about perhaps wishing Bill were dead rather than captured while reading of Barbara's and his family's desperate wishing that he was still alive.  By this afternoon, I was up to 1971 in the book, with Bill unheard from for more than 5 years, and Barbara still acting on the belief, not that he had died or been killed, but that he had been captured and was still alive.  It is painful to read of her life without her husband, but living with the belief that he was alive and would be coming home after the war was concluded.  

Reading this book is an emotional journey for me.  When I started to write these words, I had just finished her chapter 7 titled "My Country, Right or Wrong," dealing with July, 1967, when she was living in Addison, a suburb of Chicago, and working on the Eugene McCarthy campaign to end the war.  I had been discharged from the Marines on June 1, 1967.  She describes the friction within her own family over her work for McCarthy, with accusations from her brother that she was being disloyal to the country and to her presumed-captive husband.  At that time, I was going through the same kind of internal struggle between supporting McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and supporting the war, which I was convinced was unwinnable.  However, I was still in the Inactive Reserves for two years, subject to recall, as a recently discharged Marine officer, and I had many friends still in the service, mostly in the Marines and the Navy.  And, though I wasn't a practicing Catholic at the time (and hadn't been while overseas), I was still a cradle Irish Catholic, 'born in the bosom of the Church' and raised to respect authority, civil and ecclesial.  I couldn't identify with the long-haired, authority-defying anti-war protesters.  "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"  That first year back from Vietnam (1966-1967) was something of a nightmare for me, for several reasons, and the second year wasn't a whole lot better.  For Barbara Mullen, and for Bill if he was still alive, these years were a whole lot worse.

She then wrote of the fraught (too wimpy a word) years after 1967,  from the nightmares of 1968 (Tet, Conkling's assessment, the assassinations, the Democratic Convention, etc.) through the nightmares of 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Sterling Hall in Madison, etc.) to get to 1971, where I am now in the book.

Banana Bread Fail.  I massively screwed up my attempt to bake a loaf of banana bread this afternoon, while Geri was visiting her walking buddy, Barb, and helping her to learn about cable stitching.  I relied on my memory about how much flour to use, 356 grams vs. 256 grams, then misfigured how much flour I had to remove from my measuring cup, so I have about 45 grams too much flour in the batter.  Then I misread the directions about when to mix in the flour with the wet ingredients.  Then I added too much baking soda. Then, I forgot to push the “start” button on the oven to preheat it to 350 degrees.  Then, I undercooked it.  The bottom half-inch of the loaf is raw dough.  Did I mention I didn’t have enough bananas?  A true clusterf--- of a baking experience.   A throwaway.