5/7/23

 Sunday, May 7, 2023

In bed at 9:30, up at 6:30, 5(?) pss, with strange dream of being on a bus with my young children and being bothered by hooligans, fighting back and throwing the hooligans' 'swag' all over the bus,.  55℉ already, expected high of 71℉, wind WSW at 6 mph, 4 to 8 mph during the day, gusts up to 19.  0.15" of rain overnight, thunderstorm expected around 4 pm. The sun rose at 5:05, sunset at 7:59, 14+22.

California panel recommends direct cash reparations payments to Blacks.   It's hard to imagine a public policy proposal that is more likely to inflame and energize the Republican/MAGA/White Nationalist segment of America.  That the pernicious effects of slavery and Jim Crow and persistent discrimination continue today is impossible to realistically deny.  "The median wealth of Black households in the United States is $24,100, compared with $188,200 for white households, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances. In California, a recent report from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found for every $1 earned by white families, Black families earn 60 cents — the result of disparities in, among other things, education, and discrimination in the labor market."  All one need do is to look at the housing patterns in most American cities today, the  crime and prison statistics, educational statistics, etc.  I have witnessed these effects for most of the last 80 years, my entire life, starting with growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the years of block-busting, overnight neighborhood shifts from all White to all Black.  I see it every time I drive down to The Repairers of the Breach to drop off donations for the homeless, mostly Blacks.  I see it every day in my almost all White neighborhood where I am a 'limousine liberal,' in my shopping habits in almost all White Ozaukee County, etc.  I've long thought some form of reparation is morally justifiable, indeed morally required, but the harder issue is whether and to what extent reparations would require direct cash payments rather than social and economic programs designed to raise dramatically the social and economic status of Blacks in America.  In any event, what is clear is that today any program that is race-based and targetted on benefitting minority people, especially Blacks, is foredoomed to failure among the MAGA and Republican crowds.  "Nationwide, opinions on reparations are sharply divided by race. Last fall, a survey from the Pew Research Center found that 77 percent of Black Americans say the descendants of people enslaved in the United States should be repaid in some way, while 18 percent of white Americans say the same. Democrats were even split on the issue, with 49 percent opposed and 48 percent in support. Other polls on the issue have found similar splits."  Alas.

My friend Roland Wright

WaPo - Dark week at Churchill Downs spawns questions about horse racing’s future;  The old days of horse racing are gone, which was easy to see in the aftermath of a traumatic week at the Kentucky Derby.  "LOUISVILLE — When the chief veterinarian from the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission visited Barn 39 at Churchill Downs Saturday morning, he did so in the milieu of May 2023. The old days had gone. The nation’s sensibilities about animals had changed at least somewhat. A sport with 1.2 horse deaths per 100,000 entries in 2022, down by almost half since 2009 while still exceeding that of other lands, reeled in the bizarre nightmare of a venerable track on the biggest stage, with five horses dying in the previous nine days ahead of two more fallen later Saturday. . . The scratching of Kentucky Derby favorite Forte, about 10 hours before post time, owed to a bruised right foot, the kind of ailment shy of injury which very well might not have forestalled a run 50, 25, 10 or even five years ago. It happened after Forte had galloped and jogged under observation. . . . He hadn’t scratched, he’d gotten scratched, with Forte the fifth horse since midday Thursday to be out — three of those scratched and two getting scratched. That’s counting Lord Miles, who exited Thursday late afternoon with Churchill Downs’s indefinite suspension of his trainer, Saffie Joseph Jr., after two of Joseph’s horses died."

For a few years, Geri and I drove from Wisconsin to Arlington Heights, IL to spend a day watching thoroughbred horse racing at beautiful Arlington Park Racetrack.  There were typically 10 races each day and we each allowed ourselves $20 for betting, $2 apiece for each race, or more if we opted out of betting on any particular race, saving that $2 for betting $4 on another race.  We had a scientific method to our betting, to wit, we usually bet based on the horses' names.  If a horse's name appealed to us, we would bet on that horse.  We would bet our $2 usually 'across the board', win, place, or show.  This scientific method of wagering guaranteed that we would never lose more than $20 on our day at the races.  It also usually guaranteed that if one of our name-based picks ever managed to win, place, or show, our winnings would be small and would only serve to reduce our day's losses to $20 minus the take from our (usually) one winner.

My favorite activity at the racetrack was not the races themselves or the betting, but rather spending time at the paddock where the horses were saddled and mounted by the jockeys.  The horses are magnificent animals, beautiful.  I enjoyed seeing them up close and watching them led through the tunnel onto the track before each race.

We stopped going to Arlington as I learned more about the realities of thoroughbred racing and the toll it takes on those beautiful horses I admired.  Horse owners, breeders, and trainers are celebrating that the number of horse deaths per 100,00 entries is "only' 1.25, down from 2.00 a few years ago.  I wonder how we would feel if the number of baseball players who died, or were injured and had to be euthanized on the field, were 'only' 1.25 per 100,000 games or innings, or batters faced by pitchers, down from 2.00 per measuring unit.  In addition to the deaths and injuries, there is the perennial problem of trainers doping horses with drugs of various sorts, and owners and trainers starting horses racing at young ages, before their bodies are mature enough to sustain the damage done by competitive racing.  Thoroughbred racing is a cruel sport.  In 2021, 366 thoroughbreds suffered fatal injuries while racing, 33 more than in 2020.  Thoroughbred horses are a bit like professional sports franchises of all sorts, playthings of the very wealthy.  In the case of some of the sports, notably thoroughbred racing, professional boxing, and professional football, the ones who pay the price for the owners jollies are the horses, the boxers, and the football players while the owners enjoy the show.  

Dystopic States of America.  This morning's NYT: 'A gunman opened fire at a crowded mall outside Dallas on Saturday, killing at least eight people and injuring at least seven before a police officer killed him, the authorities said, turning a busy afternoon of shopping into a chaotic and tragic scene.  The ages of the injured ranged from 5 to 61. . . . According to the Gun Violence Archive, a database of shootings in the United States, there have been 199 “mass shootings,” which it defines as the shooting of at least four people, in 2023. [This on only the 177th day of the year.]  There were a particularly deadly spate of large-scale shootings this past week. . . Kaleo Palakiko, 36, was shopping with his parents for an upcoming vacation when they saw people running outside.  “It was just kind of chaotic for a second. Then when someone said, ‘shooter,’ we all ran to the back of the store,” Mr. Palakiko said. “As Americans, we’re used to this, because everyone knew exactly what to do.” . . . Representative Keith Self, a Republican who represents Allen, Texas, said on CNN that critics who are calling for more than “thoughts and prayers” after Saturday’s shooting “don’t believe in almighty God, who is absolutely in control of our lives.” Instead, he said, the country’s lack of “mental health institutions” is to blame."

USA!  DSA!  USA! DSA!

Chauffeur work.  I drove Peter to his job at the Wisconsin Athletic Club for his 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. shift.  I noticed he has a start on a mustache at age 16.  Made me wonder when I started shaving'; no recollection.  I do remember the old, heavy Gillette  razors though and Gillette Blue Blades

My heart leaps up.  Looking through my bathroom window I saw a pair of beautiful mourning doves, one in front of the other, walking in their distinctive mourning dove way, beneath the bottle brush buckeye shrub.

My Heart Leaps Up

William Wordsworth - 1770-1850

My heart leaps up when I behold 

   A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began; 

So is it now I am a man; 

So be it when I shall grow old, 

   Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

5/6/23

 Saturday, May 5, 2023

In bed by 10, up at 6:04, seeming to hear pile driving from the County Line bridge construction, or is it my heartbeat?  51℉, drizzle, high 57℉, wind SSE at 10 mph, 7 to 12 mph today, gusts up to 25 mph, total rainfall of .25" expected today.  Sun rose at 5:38, sunset at 7:58, 14+19.

Dinner with the Kevils.  We had a delightful dinner with David and Sharon and Ellis last night, celebrating Sharon's 45th birthday a couple of days late.  David prepared homemade crab Rangoon and stone crab legs which we enjoyed before sitting down at the dining room table for fried rice with bay scallops and a salad.  At the end of the dinner, Ellis entertained with a spirited reading of her book about a 3rd grade class and their lunch at the school with chicken nuggets and PA announcements by Miss Saltwalter.   Ellis has great reading skill and even greater dramatic skills - thoroughly enjoyable for all of us.  We both think she is an extraordinary child, and not just from grandparently bias.

American Dystopia: "A Country Governed by Fear -How America became a violent society" By Elizabeth Bruenig.  

"[C]ertain factors can turn an uncomfortable situation into an intolerable one, such as living in a society where anybody could have a gun, where any agitation can boil over into mass murder. An irate neighbor slaying five people with an AR-15-style rifle after a noise complaint in Texas; an unstable Coast Guard veteran killing one and injuring four while attending an appointment with his mother in an Atlanta hospital. The stakes in any given episode of public agitation or distress or even psychosis aren’t typically all that high; the majority of people having crises at any time represent no risk to anyone (save, perhaps, themselves), but the incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous."

I think of the 84 year old man in Kansas City who shot in the head the 14 year old boy who mistakenly rang his doorbell to pick up his brother.  84 years old = feelings of vulnerabilty (based on the reality of increased vulnerablity.)  Add fear of young Black men (based on a steady stream of news stories about violent crimes committed by young Black men.)  Add having a loaded pistol in the home (one of a number perhaps exceeding 350,000,000 lethal firearms in the United States.)  The fact is that each one of us is in danger of being the victim, intended or unintended, of a gunshot.  Driving to the VA on the freeway puts me at risk of gunshots, either because of a road rage incident or perhaps catching a stray shot in a moving gun fight between members of opposing inner city gangs.  The lighter your skin, the less your risk of a gunshot wound; the darker your skin, the greater the risk.  

The occasion for Margaret Breunig's essay was the chokehold strangulation killing of a mentally ill Black man on a subway in NYC.

 "This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by all the incidents of random gun violence that came before, is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society. Nobody looks forward to encountering people behaving erratically on the subway, and neither does anyone want to fall victim to an act of stochastic violence, but killing a mentally ill man on a train doesn’t represent much of an improvement upon either circumstance. It represents the loss of a peaceful commons, the absence of compassion, and the overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence. This is the country we have become."

I know that the odds of me or any of my loved ones becoming the victim of a gunshot wound, lethal or otherwise, are infinitesimally small.  I do not let the fear of freeway shootings keep me from using the freeway on my frequent trips to the VA.  But as Margaret Breunig points out, it is the awareness of the ubiquity of guns and the knowledge that any given stranger we may encounter may be both armed and willing to shoot his firearm for any number of reasons that has turned us into a society of fear, the "overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence."

In addition to the fear of violence, especially gun violence, we have the fear of creeping Fascism, or 'authoritarianism' as it is euphemistically called in news reports.  We have come to see that a significant minority of Americans are quite willing to sacrifice our so-called imperfect democracy for the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.  The only guy who MAYBE is standing between us and a second and infinitely more dangerous term of office for Trump is Joe Biden, who would be 82 years old at the beginning of his second term, 86 at its end.  He has frozen out all other possible candidates to take on Donald Trump as the likely Republican candidate.  And it appears he is committed to keeping the unpopular Kamala Harris as his vice president running mate.  Trump and those he appointed to powerful goveernmental offices did their best to wreck our governement and our imperfect 'rule of law'.  He has filled the judiciary with fellow trevelers like the judge in Florida who threw a monkey wrench into the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the judge in Texas who reversed the FDA findings on the safety of mifepristone.  Not to mention Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett and the damage they have done and will do to the country in the decades ahead.  If the risk of personally experiencing gun violence is small, I can't say the same of the risk of the country becoming Fascist and this will profoudly effect our children, our grandchildren, and all Americans, indeed the whole world.  I am trembling.

An oil painting I did during the Balkan wars of Servians killing anywone who wasn't Serbian: Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Montenegrins, genocidal ethnic cleanings. 

Meh.  This was the one word entry that Sarah posted to FB today.   I commented: "Meh too."  I'm feeling helf dead today, mind-dead, zombieish.  Cause unknown.  The day itself is gray and dismal, with rain and thunderstorms expected this evening.

Coronation Day in London.  There is something really sick about this event.  The UK is a nation on its heels.  The king/queen/royals nonsense is really a nostalgic celebration of Empire, of the days when English swells ruled over, exploited, plundered, and oppressed people who were unable to resist British naval and military power, people like the Irish and East Indians.  

5/5/23

Friday, May 5, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 4:30, after multiple pss, lyrics of Jane Olivor's The Big Parade repeating in my brain, 50℉ wit drizzle, high of 63℉, cloudy, dry day ahead, wind X at 8 mph, 7 to 13 mph during the day with gusts up to 25 mph, sunrise at 5:39, sunset at 7:57, 14+17.

Geri and Lilly.  I am struck once again by Geri's actions as a loving caregiver.  I am seeing it now with Lilly but I've seen it before, with her sons, her brother Jim and with her sister-in-law Nancy and her nephews and niece, with my Dad, with her friend Elise, and even with our dear cat Blanche.  I used to rattle my good friend David Branch, long since deceased, by pontificating that women are better human beings than men are,  I still believe that is true, notwithstanding its generality, but how could I believe otherwise with the role models in my life, my mother, my sister, and now Geri.

My favorite photo of Lilly kissing Geri (with the reflection of my bedroom window on the large photo hanging on my wall.)

LTMW at two squirrels atop our shepherd's crook competing for control of the sunflower seed feeder and suet cake.  And at a magnificent male goldfinch, with perfect coloration landing briefly on the suet cake holder and then flying away.  On the ground, a squirrel and a chipmunk (probably the one that resides under our front door stoop) compete for grazing rights; the squirrel wins. . . Now a male goldfinch on the sunflower seed feeder, a female on the niger feeder, and a male downy woodpecker on the suet cake.  Then I spotted a bird with a dull yellow breast and belly, too dull to be a goldfinch, and wondered if it might be a yellow warbler, which I googled, and saw similar birds including ovenbirds which reminded me of Robert Frost's poem:

The Oven Bird

BY ROBERT FROST

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Although the poem compares summer to spring and metaphorically, middle years to youth, the concluding line - what to make of a diminished thing - makes me think of old age, and indeed what to make of a diminished thing, an old man, an old woman, even -today at least- our old dog.

License Plate Renewal; Emissions test.  The closest emissions testing site I could find is on the north end of Port Washington, about 25 miles away.  The state of Wiscnsin used to operate its own emissions testing sites.  I believe that was changed under Scott Walker's administration; state facilities were closed and the job handed out to private companies.  The last two private sites I used have both ceased giving the tests, almost certainly because it wasn't profitable enough.  The site in Grafton that I called to arrange this year's test also has stopped doing the tests and almost certainly for the same reason.  So now I take a 50 mile round trip, adding to the air pollution all along the route, in order to get my Volvo tested to see how many pollutants it emits.  Also, the registration fee is up to $130/year.  

Dinner at David and Sharon's tonight with Mary Beth Sazama, celebrating Sharon's 45th birthday 3 days ago.

5/4/23

 Thursday, May 4, 2023

In bed at ?, up at 6:44, 42℉, high of 59℉, mostly sunny, soft wind at 4 mph, 2 to 13 mph today, gusts up to 23 mph.  The sun rose at 5:40, sets at 7:56,, 14+15.

Lilly has been having 'accidents,' peeing in her sleep, on the sofa we bought for her to be able to snuggle next to Geri, and also on her bed in Geri's bedroom.  We mourn at what this may mean. We know she has reached her life expectancy, and we dread losing her, an incredibly sad prospect. . . . . Geri took a urine sample to the vet's office this afternoon to be analyzed for a UTI. Result was no UTI so no antibiotics prescribed but rather another med to be given twice a day to reduce incontinence.

Also, I took the cushion covers for 'Lilly's sofa' up to Martinizing and was told I need to bring the covers in on the cushions because the dry cleaning will shrink the covers othwise.  Also I was told the cleaning will take 2 and 1/2 weeks!

More from the Rachel Cusk piece on Annie Ernaux & Delphine de Vigan.  "Among other things, what de Vigan — and the powerful response of her public — testified to was the personal cost exacted by life in this exalted, beautiful yet patriarchal nation. . . Her mother’s pain “was part of our childhood, and later of our lives as adults,” she writes. “Without doubt her pain formed us, my sister and me. Yet any attempt at explanation is bound to fail. Instead I must make do with a writing made of odds and ends, of fragments, of hypotheses.”  I had the same experience putting together the memoir of my life up to the time of my children's births.  I spent many, many months, and years at the project with genealogical and other research, and remembering what I could remember, but with my parents ending up with only bits of "odds and ends, of fragments, of hypotheses."  And mysteries about so much, my mother's early life growing up with no mother in a house full of males, of the time when she was left in Chicago when my grandfather and the boys moved to Texas, of life in the Great Depression, her decision to marry at 18, life before my father left for the war, whether he could have avoided the draft for his work in a war industry plant, whether she thought he abandoned her with me not yet 3 and Kitty on the way, whether and why she never wrote him, their life when he returned with PTSD, the rape, the notoriety, her relationship with my grandmother, the move to Luna Pier MI, and so much more.  As I think back now as an old man on our life in that basement apartment at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue when I was a little boy, I am overcome with an immense sadness.  And much as with my mother, the same is true with regard to my father, so much unknown, so many unknowns.  I had a chance to learn from my father simply because he was still alive and living with us for a few years, but he was not one to talk of anything unpleasant or painful.  "The less said, the better."  How often did I hear those words when I was growing up?  How often did Kitty and I in our morning conversations late in life discuss the many unknowns of our parents' lives in those years following the end of World War II?

24h Jerusalem.  I've been watching this series of half-hour segments on OVID.  It's very interesting, cutting back and forth from Jewish residents to Palestinian residents and Christian (Franciscan) residents.. 

5/3/23

 Wednesday, May 3, 2023

In bed at 10:10, up at 5:53 after interrupted sleep with intestinal problems of unknown cause, dream of TSJ leaving for another state, wanting me to accept his pickup, in an unsafe condition, Caela, Jessie, Ben; 36℉, high of 52℉, sunny morning, cloudy afternoon and evening, wind NNW at 11mph, 4 to 12 mph and gusts up to 23 today, Sun rose at 5:41, sunset at 7:55, 14+12.      

Called Linda Barnes yesterday, breaking through my resistance to returning to the House of Peace,  I left a message on her voicemail but haven't heard back from her.

Returned Ed Felsenthal's call yesterday.  He said in the message he left that he had sent me an email yesterday but I haven't received it.  Ed hasn't returned my return call so I will send him an email this morning. . . . Ed called from his Marco Island retreat at about 10:30 to invite me to his and Lynn's 60th wedding anniversary in Palos Heights, IL on June 3.  They married at Christ the King Church in Beverly Hills, Chicago on June 8, 1963, with me among Ed's groomsmen, and Anne and I married in St. Eugene's in South Euclid, OH, one week later, with Ed as my best man.  We exchanged updates and schmoozed for 36 minutes, remarking that our group of college roommates, all in our 80s and still alive and kicking (though not too fast and not too high) are beating the odds on longevity.

"The Carapace of Self"  I read an essay in this morning's NYT,   Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write By Rachel Cusk.  Last year, I read Ernaux's autobiographical 2020 novel Happening about her experiences obtaining an illegal abortion in 1963, 4 years before the legalization of oral contraception and 12 years before voluntary abortions were decriminalized.  In Rachel Cusk's essay, she discusses not only Ernaux's life and writing but also that of another French author, Delphine de Vigan, and in discussing her memoir Nothing Holds Back the Night about de Vigan's mother's suicide, Cusk says:

With this book, de Vigan spectacularly marked the end of her self-annexation, or rather the point at which the internal pressure of truth forced its content out into the world. Her mother’s suicide was a sort of refusal or breakdown of the female narrative. To comprehend it, every aspect of de Vigan’s reality had to be dismantled: the entire carapace of self, of history both personal and impersonal, of memory and fact and myth, of the collective life and the individual reality, and most of all of writing — narration — and its relationship to being. The book is not so much a reconstruction of her mother’s life as a gathering of evidence, by which the private and subjective is made public and accountable. It required a painstaking examination of her wider family — a formidable and traditionally French clan of aunts and uncles and grandparents — and therefore of family culture itself. The resulting book is an inquiry into the “reality” a child is born into, a domain tyrannized by authority structures and social codes in which the personal binds fatally with the authorized and communal to make a theater of blood relationships.

 

The phrase that caught my attention was a "carapace of self,"  the notion of a hard, outer shell we creatures build to protect our/selves from injury and, in the case of humans, from hurt, emotional pain, threats, etc.  It brought to mind feelings I've had in my younger life of the imposter syndrome, the sense of fraudulence, the sense that I don't belong here.  That feeling springs in large part from what Cusk calls family culture and 'the "reality" a child is born into, a domain tyrannized by authority structure and social codes in which the personal binds fatally with the authorized and communal . . .", i.e., the accident(s) of birth.  From all kinds of sources, our childhood imbues in us a sense of  who we are and where we belong.  My mother's occasional references to people who "come from money" was an unintended and unnecessary reminder that we did not "come from money."  Even the helpful, loving, and nurturing stress on the importance of education carried a not-so-veiled reminder that my parents were uneducated, working-class, blue collar workers.  When I got to Marquette to live and study and socialize with others my age who did 'come from money,' whose parents were business owners and managers or professional people, I couldn't avoid the feeling that I didn't belong here, that I was out of my league.  Ed Felsenthat's family lived in their own fancy home in the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Chicago; his father owned the family's lucrative business selling construction materials.  Jerry Nugent's dad was a stock or insurance broker.  Tom Devitt's dad was a LaSalle street lawyer, his uncle a federal judge in Minneapolis.  Even Joe Daley's father owned the family dairy farm outside of Columbus, WI.  Only Bill Hendricks among my roommates had a working mother, who was either divorced or widowed; we never asked or knew which.  I don't recall carrying that feeling of 'not belonging' into the Marine Corps, perhaps because of the degree to which Marine training leveled all of us, everyone wearing the same uniform, paid the same by rank and length of service, inculcated with the same martial values, etc.  But I had some of the same feelings again in law school where so many of my classmates were sons (we had precious few women students then) of lawyers or professional people.  Perhaps the heyday of the sense of fraudulence came when I was appointed to the full-time faculty upon graduation from law school.  The only other person to have had that distinction at MULS was the then chief justice of the Wisconsin supreme court, E. Harold Hallows.  I still remember one property law class I was teaching early in my academic career when I had an out-of-body experience, looking back at myself lecturing, as I lectured, and thinking that I was a clown.  

Looking back now on that ' imposter syndrome', not-belonging feelings, I realize they were a bit neurotic but not particularly surprising.  I worked hard and did well at a good high school and scored well on the Navy's competitive math and science test to win the means to go away to college with a full tuition scholarship.  I got into law school on the basis of my undergraduate record and military service and deserved to be there as much as any of the 'legacy admissions' and (forgive me) my classmates who 'came from money.'  And I was appointed to the faculty because of my law school record (which included excelling in moot court, editing the law review, and teaching 1Ls for months in a voluntary study group I led in my senior year.  But as Rachel Cusk, Delphine de Vigan, and Annie Ernaux remind me, we carry our childhood experiences with us as we move through life, including our childhood traumas, feelings of shame, and insecurities.  One of my favorite quotes: "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

5/2/23

 Tuesday, May 2, 2023

In bed at 10, awake at 5:35, and fell back to sleep until 6:30 with a dream of being a blind date for a friend of Nikki at a prom of some sort in Madison.  I was friendly, non-threatening, talkative, and old.  She was shy, reticent, and considered herself homely. 😕😳 It's 40℉ looking forward to a high of 46℉, wind NW at 17 mph, 12 to 26 mph during the day, gusts up to 33 mph, after another cold windy day yesterday, wind chill is 31℉, with .4" of wintery mix in last 24 hours.  Spring in Wisconsin. Sun rose at 5:44, and will set at 7:54, 14+10.

Sharon is 45 today, the youngest (I think) of our children's spouses, though I'm not sure of Anh's age.  I was 45 in 1986, which seems like a million years ago.  Ronald Reagan in the White House, started to dodder at age 75.  It was the year that about 5,000,000 people held hands to form a human chain from NYC to Long Beach, CA to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness in America.  Could that happen today?  Also the year of the Chernobyl meltdown, the U.S. bombing of Libya, the Iran-Contra scandal, and an American cruiser and a destroyer entering Russian territorial water near Crimea under a right of 'peaceful passage.'  It wouldn't happen today.  Could Chernobyl, maybe at Zaporizhzhia?  I think I was practicing law, involved in the seemingly endless Occidental Petroleum/Waste Management litigation, the seemingly endless Raintree Publishing-Robert Maxwell litigation, and starting the Black and Veatch /LaCrosse County litigation.  

Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship.  June 1 is now the magic date.  The unthinkable has become thinkable again.  Retirement savings at risk for millions of oldsters.  Who will blink first?  No telling with McCarthy.

LTMW at chickadees nabbing nesting materials from our supply depot.  The first sight this morning on opening the Venetian blinds was our acrobatic squirrel hanging upside down working on the suet cake.

VA this morning for pelvic floor muscles therapy.  The 'internal work' was fairly painful,

American Dystopia.  In a suburb of Houston, TX this week, a neighbor who was asked to stop shooting his AR-15 combat rifle so a baby next door could get to sleep used that rifle to shoot and kill the neighbors with the restless baby, including a 9-year-old victim.  Just in the past month: A teenager was shot in the head (but fortunately survived) in Kansas City, Mo., for approaching the wrong house to pick up his siblings. A young woman in Upstate New York was shot and killed when the car she was in mistakenly pulled into the wrong driveway. A man and woman making a delivery in Florida were shot at for going to the wrong address.  In the Houston area outrage, Republican governor and misanthrope Greg Abbott dismissed the victims as "five illegal immigrants."  In Wisconsin this week we learned that Re[ublican legislative leaders are planning to strip out almost all of the gun safety legislation proposed by Democratic governor Evers in his budget plan.  Democracy is not working; autocracy here will be right-wing and worse.  Wherein lies hope?

Coronation nausea.  Everything about the crowning of King Charles III is abominable but perhaps (could be worse stuff) the worst is the pledge of allegiance the king will ask all his "subjects" to voice at his crowning: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God,”  Please, pass the basin.👑

Grammarly.  Madeleine Kelly Lubar introduced me to this writing app when each of us was working on our eulogies for TSJ.  I downloaded the free version and have been using it ever since January 22, 4 days after Tom's death.  It's very useful for catching typos of which I have many.  It also reinforces my tendency to hyphenate words and phrases, like "6-years-old."  Now it is regularly e-mailing to me weekly statistics about my writing, like: (1)  442,019 total words analyzed by Grammarly since Jan 22, 2023 (15,453 last week), and (2) I've used more unique words than 91% of Grammarly users, and (3) my 'Grammarly writing streak is 14 weeks.   The kind of information one really needs, like exactly how many words one has typed into one's laptop and how Precisely how many words since January 22, 2023.😕

E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald J. Trump.  I am reminded every day of Hartmann's crime against my mother, especially by how Carroll was treated on cross-examination by Joe Tacopina.  I'm thinking of how the Chicago press made my mother the subject of notoriety.  From my memoir:

[September 30, 1947] It was that night that a 15 year old boy who lived 3 blocks south of us, broke into our apartment, threatened to kill Kitty and me, slashed my mother with a knife, ripped her clothes off, and sodomized her.

The following day, October 1st, the Chicago Daily News ran a front page story about the crime, stating that my mother, who was forced to “commit a sexual act under threat of death to her 2 children,” was not able to identify the assailant from certain photos shown to her.  The following day, however, there was no longer any mystery as to the identity of the attacker who, it turned out, had stabbed another woman to death in a parking lot near 63rd and Halsted Streets.  The Daily News ran a full page banner headline “BOY’S OWN STORY OF SLAYING.”  The story was accompanied by a three column photograph of the attacker, James Hartmann, surrounded by Chicago detectives.  A separate story about Hartmann’s actions in our home appeared on page 2.  It included the following:

The detectives had questioned 200 neighbors in the vicinity of the home of Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, of 7303 S. Emerald av., who was slashed on the wrist before she finally submitted to an intruder Tuesday.  . . .

At the station [Hartmann] said he intended only to commit burglary at the Clausen home.  However, he unexpectedly found Mrs. Clausen at home lying on a bed clothed, and he made an indecent proposal.

He admitted ripping her clothes off and then forcing her to submit to him.  He denied threatening Mrs. Clausen’s two children, 6 and 3, with the brown-handled, five inch blade knife he carried.

At the police station last night [Hartmann] was viewed by four witnesses to the Bush slaying, and by Mrs. Clausen.

Mrs. Clausen was near collapse after identifying him.  . . A brother of Mrs. Mrs. Clausen leaped up from his chair, lunged toward the boy, and missed a haymaker.  A half-dozen police restrained the man.

The same day, a photograph of my mother appeared on page 2 of The Chicago Daily Tribune, accompanying the following that appeared as the lead story on the front page of the paper under the 5 column banner headline “KNIFE KILLER, 15, CONFESSES.”

James Hartmann, 15, of 710 W. 76th Street, pupil in the Chicago Vocational School, confessed last night that he stabbed to death Mrs. Gracelyn Bush, 32, wife of a minister, in an attempted robbery in the parking lot near 63rd and Green Sts.

He told the slaying story after acknowledging, upon being seized for questioning, that he committed a sex crime against Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, of 7303 S. Emerald Avenue, Tuesday night.  Mrs. Clausen’s wrist was slashed with a knife and she was dragged out of the bed in her basement apartment where she had been sleeping with her two small children.

       Mrs. Clausen identified Hartmann.  Afterwards she fainted and was assisted out of the room by her husband and detectives.  While Hartmann was being taken to another office through a corridor, a spectator said to be a relative of Mrs. Clausen lunged at him.  Hartmann fought the detectives holding him in an effort to retaliate.

The Chicago Sun, predecessor of the Sun Times, ran a full page banner headline, Boy Confesses Stab Murder! including the news that “Mrs. Clausen was “robbed and slashed in her home at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue [and was] forced to submit to indignities.”  The Daily News filled the entire back page of the paper with photos of Hartmann with Chicago detectives obviously straining to be included in the news photos.  One showed a detective pointing to the knife Hartmann used on Mrs. Bush and the one he used on my mother.  

The Chicago Tribune published a photo of my mother at the police station and a map showing exactly where we lived and our address, 7303 S. Emerald Aveune.  On October 3, the Tribune ran a follow-up story, including this:

Hartmann will be charged with robbery and a crime against nature for his offense against Mrs. Clausen, 7303 Emerald Avenue, whom he pulled out of bed and mistreated in her home Tuesday night.  He robbed her before fleeing.

The Chicago Sun ran another front page story, with a photograph of Hartmann being comforted by his step-father.

Remorseless and alert, Jimmy Hartmann scrawled his signature to two confessions in which he told in detail of the knife murder of Mrs. Gracelyn Bush, 35, on September 24 and the sex torture and robbery of Mrs. Mary Clausen, 25, last Tuesday night.”

After reading the two confessions, [State’s Attorney] Touhy released to newspapers the youth’s story of the Bush murder but withheld the statement on the Clausen case.

"It was one of the most shocking I have ever read,” the prosecutor said.  “It is too appalling, too atrocious to be read by the public.  "Considerations of Mrs. Clausen would also require that it be withheld.”

On October 6th another Tribune story appeared stating that Hartmann forced my mother “to commit a sex act when he threatened to kill her child.”  

I was that child.

Over the next few months, the Chicago newspapers carried many stories about Hartmann and his murder of Mrs. Bush and sexual assault on my mother.  The Chicago Sun seemed to take particular delight in the story, running many, many photographs of Hartmann day after day, one with his visiting parents in the office of the warden at the Cook County Jail, one with his lawyer, another with his step-father, even one of Hartmann resting on his bed in his jail cell, with an accompanying story about his crying in his cell and being bothered that he wasn’t the focus of attention of reporters and photographers.  The text of the news stories referred to Hartmann as a “sex pervert” who confessed to “a degenerate attack” and “a fiendish attack” on my mother, but the photos all seemed calculated to generate sympathy for “pudgy” 15 year old and his family, with nary a word about the families of Gracelyn Bush and Mary Clausen.

Paul Harvey, then 29 years old, reported the crime against my mother on his radio show on WENR, with the spin “Wife of young Marine, veteran of Iwo Jima . . .” My mother’s name, address, and photograph and the nature of the crime against her were publicized to everyone in Chicago who could read a newspaper.  

Hartmann was referred to four psychiatrists for sanity assessments.  On December 2nd, the Tribune reported that all four (two for the prosecution, two for the defense) agreed that Hartmann had a “psychopathic personality” but was legally sane.  On January 20, 1948, a jury found him guilty of murder of Mrs. Bush and, notwithstanding the prosecutor’s plea for the death penalty, he was sentenced to 25 years incarceration.  The news of the verdict was carried on a banner headline across the entire front page of the Tribune: “25 Years For Boy Killer.”  With ‘good time,’ he could be paroled in 13 years and 9 months.  Toward the end of the story, it was reported that he would be tried later for the assault on my mother and “for looting her apartment.”  The March 9th edition of the paper carried the story that Hartmann had pleaded guilty to burglary and a crime against nature and ‘thrown himself on the mercy of the court.’  He received a sentence of one to ten years for breaking into our apartment, dragging my mother out of her bed, slashing her wrist, tearing her clothes off, threatening to kill her child or children, sodomizing her and looting her apartment.

My mother was 25 years old when she was slashed, sodomized, and otherwise brutalized by Hartmann.  The crime occurred just after ‘birthday season’ in our family.  My father had turned 27 three weeks before the attack, Kitty and I had just turned 3 and 6 a few weeks before.  I remember hearing the name “Hartmann” when I was a child and thought I remembered hearing of his being captured in the Wieboldt’s parking lot in the 63rd and Halsted Streets shopping district.  As the Tribune story reveals, however, my memory was faulty.  That parking lot was where he killed Mrs. Bush a week before breaking into our apartment and attacking my mother.  The crime was never mentioned around me or Kitty as we grew up.

My mother told me that Hartmann had held a knife to my throat and threatened to kill me.  I thought she told me that the crime had occurred in an apartment on the first floor of our building, where she was babysitting for our friends, the Baxters, and that the crime had occurred when I was about one year old, which would explain why I have no memory of the event.  The Tribune story, on the other hand, reveals that the crime occurred in our own miniscule basement apartment and that I was six years old, not a baby.  I had just started the first grade at St. Leo Grammar School.

Reading the newspaper accounts of the attack in the course of preparing these letters set me back on my heels.

My mother was dragged out of the bed on which she was lying with Kitty and me. Her wrist was slashed with Hartmann’s knife.  This kind of wound is a defensive wound; she had her arm up to defend herself or Kitty or me or all of us against Hartmann’s knife.   The slashing of her wrist and the dragging her out of bed occurred on the bed I was on in our crackerbox of an apartment, where no space was far from any other space.  I learned only recently that my father got home from his second shift job at 1 o’clock in the morning to find police cars with flashing lights around our apartment building and many police present.  How could I not have awakened and witnessed what happened?  How can I have no memory of this?

For years I have had a recurrent nightmare.  It is a simple one: it’s the middle of the night and dark and there is someone in the room, a stranger, menacing.  When I experience the nightmare, I make a loud moaning sound as if I am trying to scare away the intruder by making scary sounds.  Your mother has been awakened by this moaning, as has Geri and my college roommates and perhaps also my tentmates in Vietnam.  I never associated this recurring nightmare with anything until I read the Tribune story.  What did I see?  What did I hear?  Was I cowardly?  Did I hide under the covers and moan?  What did I do?

I told you earlier of my second earliest memory: sitting on the floor of the living room with my father shouting at me.  I had always thought that that incident occuroccurred shortly after he returned home from the war.  I now believe it occurred after the attack by Hartmann, as we were waiting to be taken to my grandparents’ house on Racine Avenue while he and my mother dealt with the police. 

This crime occurred in 1947.  We continued to live in that tiny apartment for at least another six or seven years.  (Neither Kitty nor I can remember the year when we moved next door.)  How could my mother and father have continued to live there?  How did they live with the associations that space must have occasioned?  I suspect that the answer is that that tiny basement space with the steam pipes overhead and the cockroaches underfoot was all they could afford.  It had to be dirt cheap and in those years we were dirt poor.

How was my mother affected by the slashing of her wrists, the threatening of her children’s lives, the “sexual torture” by a ‘degenerate pervert’? How was she affected by having her name, her photograph, her address, and the fact of her violation spread across the front pages of all the Chicago newspapers? Every member of the family (except we children), every neighbor, every friend, every co-worker, every St. Leo parishioner, every busybody and tale-teller knew of the “indignities” she suffered, the “sex torture” and “crimes against nature” committed on her, the perversions forced upon her. Almost overnight, she had gone from an anonymous young mother of two trying to cope with an emotionally wounded husband home from the war to front page news, from anonymity to notoriety. Anyone in Chicago with 4¢ to buy the Sun or 5¢ to buy the Tribune or the Daily News could ‘read all about it!” It is inconceivable to me that she did not have her own PTSD to deal with, but I have no memory of symptomatic behavior on her part – no alcohol abuse, no emotional withdrawal, none of the behaviors I remember with respect to my father. This is not to say that she did not have symptomatic behaviors; I am quite confident that she must have. I simply do not recall them, just as I do not recall the crime itself, though I was present throughout it. I have blacked it out, as I have blacked out many memories from those days and other painful memories. I remember my father’s behavior only because its worst features were so profound and long-lasting that it has been impossible to forget.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5/1/23

 Monday, May 1, 2023

In bed at 10:30, awake at 5:30, up at 5:45, let Lilly oout into a light rain and snow forecast for the next hour.  35℉, high of 43℉, wind WNW at 19 mph, gusts up to 38 mph, wind chill    is 24℉.  Sunrise at 5:45, sunset at7:53, 14+7.

Kitty candle  I lit my Kitty candle today, not the yahrzeit candle but the votive light like the one I sent her a couple (few?) years ago to keep her company during her nightly insomnia and as a sign I was with her.  Also lit a myrrh incense cone to enjoy before Geri and Lilly wake up.  I think incense bothers Lilly's sense of smell.   I've decided to use my Catholic yahrzeit candle as an multi-person yahrzeit: Dad on February 2 (2007), Kitty on March 3 (2022), Mom on April 15 (1973) and Tom, January 18 (2023)

 McCarthy has invited Netanyahu to visit Congress, skip White House.  Here we go again. Fascisti cum fascisti congregantur.  Has he checked with Netanyahu to determine whether the invitation will be accepted once extended?  If so, Netanyahu once again pokes a stick in the eyes of American liberals and moderates.  In 2015, as Netanyahu was trying to torpedo President Barack Obama’s plans to negotiate a nuclear weapons deal with Iran, the prime minister arranged with Republican leaders to speak against the deal to a joint session of Congress.  Today McCarthy is scheduled to become just the second U.S. speaker to address a full session of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and the first since his fellow Republican Newt Gingrich appeared here in 1998.  McCarthy is the second high-profile Republican to visit Jepeaker to address a full session of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and the first since his fellow Republican Newt Gingrich appeared here in 1998.  McCarthy is the second high-profile Republican to visit Jerusalem in recent days. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate, stopped off during a four-country trade mission last week.  Netanyahu, McCarthy, Gingrich, DeSantis - Fascisti cum fascisti congregantur.

Ulysses.  It has been lightly raining almost all day.  I drove down to The Repairers of the Breach to drop off some clothing of Geri's and mine and some other useful stuff.  I exited the freeway at North Avenue, turned south at 12th Street, the route I used to take to get to MULS when Anne and I lived on Oriole Avenue, turned west on Walnut to 17th Street, where The House of Peace is located (and looked busy today, from the cars parked in front), then down to Vliet Street only to discover the street was closed, torn up for repaving, only the westbound lane open for traffic.   I took a circuitous route that got me back onto 12th Street where I could turn west again on Vliet Street and drove past Repairers and saw that there was no way to get close with my car so I headed back to 17th Street and then north till I hit Fond du Lac, to 20th Street all the way up to Capitol Drive which would take me to the Spectrum Store where I could drop off the router and 2 wifi extenders which I needed to return so Spectrum would stop billing us for renting them.  (The Eero mesh system we bought from the Geek Squad rep has been working perfectly, keeping my fingers crossed.)

As I drove on some residential streets in this inner city neighborhood, I noticed how incredibly bad the streets were, potholes and cracks abounding, the result of years and years of deferred maintenance.  Driving over them with my tender bladder reminded me my trip in the ambulance from our house outside of Saukville to the ER at CSMO.  I compared those streets with the streets in Bayside, Fox Point, River Hills and Mequon.  I saw a number of churches which seem almost as numerous as taverns in the inner city and reflected on how enslaved Africans and those who lived under Jim Crow came up with their own forms of religious practice, liturgies, clergy development and music since they were excluded from the White churches in the Slave States.

I passed The House of Peace both on the way to and the way from Repairers of the Breach and wondered if I should stop in to visit Linda Barnes, who is assistant director now.  She was the Catholic Charities-funded social worker there when I was executive director.  I decided not to stop, in part because of the rain and the risks of street parking there and because she might be busy with business of the HOP, but I should make a point of calling her to see about a visit.  I haven't returned there since I left under circumstances less than ideal and my nose has always been a little, maybe more than a little, out of joint about how the Capuchins dealt with me, especially Brother Bob Smith, nephew of the place's founder Brother Booker Ashe.  It's been 20 years since those days and I've long since come to realize why they came to think of me as 'not in the club' (naively outspoken about the sexual abuse scandals in the Church).  In any event, Linda and I had a good relationship when we worked together and I ought to see if we could visit.  Linda was the victim of a criminal stalker when I was leading the HOP.  She dated him once of twice and realized he was no good and refused to see him anymore.  One night, he lay in wait for her behind her garage, armed with a knife, and attacked and slashed her, requiring some hospitalization.  When he was captured, arrested, and convicted  of the the assault, the judge (Joe Donald, an MULS grad) sentenced him to some months (not years) of confinement which of course shocked Linda.  The ADA had told Linda that it was not necessary for her to be at the sentencing and Linda had opted to stay away.  When she received the news of the light sentence she came to my office in distress.  I offered such comfort as I could though I was also shocked by the light sentence.  Linda's statement to me as she left my office was "I'm going to get me a gun."  Therein lies a big part of reason why so many people in the inner city own firearms.  Not the only reason by any means, but part of it, the realization that the police and the courts cannot protect them from violence.  In Bayside, we have a police car cruising down our street at least once an hour.  Hard to know whether it has any deterrent effect in our already low-crime village but that practice, and the state of our well-paved streets, reminds me again that I am a 'limousine liberal.'