12/28/23

 Thursday, December 28, 2023

In bed at 9:30, awake on onto lzb at 2, up at 2:52.  Let Lilly out.  36°, drizzle, high of 39.  Wind N at 14 mph, 11018/30, 0.2" of rain expected, Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:23, 9+0.

Treadmill; pain.  30:35 & 0.65 while watching Leonard Berstein's Harvard Lecture on Mahler's 9th, especially the last movement & watching and listening to him conducting it.  He is obviously ecstatic with it; I'm left cold.  

MAID and the Dobbs decision.  Is this next?  I read an op-ed in this morning's NYT entitled "I Promised My Sister I Would Write About How She Chose to Die."  It was written by Stephen Petrow about his beloved sister's medical assistance in dying.  New Jersey is one of only 10 states permitting MAID, an option chosen by his 61-year old sister  Julie who suffered with terminal cancer, suffered with intense pain largely unrelieved by fentanyl and morphine.  I was struck by his description of her death and how her family members dealt with it, but also by the fact that the author and his sister Julie and their 2 siblings texted each other 'good night' each evening.  It remined me of course of my daily early morning conversations by text message with my own sister, of how important they were to each of us, and of what a hole has been left in my life by her passing.  I also thought, OMG, medically assisted dying must surely be on the target list for the Right-to-Life crowd.  

I'm grateful for medicines, especially when they work as advertised, which sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.  I used to wonder if all the meds I take each day are doing me any good, or whether, on the other hand, maybe they're doing me in.   Or perhaps working against one another.  I take literally a fistful each morning and another fistful in the afternoon or evening.  I have an entire bureau drawer devoted solely to various meds, creams, and ointments that I get from the VA.  I've often wondered how much these meds would cost us if it were not for my disability rating entitling me to VA meds at no cost to me.  The Trulicity and empagliflozin and probably rosuvastatin are, I think, pretty costly.  In any case, I no longer wonder whether the meds are killing me or doing no good.  I've come to believe that they have probably made it possible for me to live into my 80s, especially the blood pressure and diabetes medications.  Perhaps I should add the daily full-strength aspirin to that list, prescribed to help me avoid a stroke after my probable diagnosis of a mini-stroke a few years ago (11/24/2020).  And then there are all the vaccinations I have received, 7 for covid alone, plus annual flu shots and now RSV.  My mother died at 51, but my father lived to age 86 and stayed in pretty good shape - no sign of dementia or any suggestion of a need for assisted living or nursing-home-level care.  I still don't know his real cause of death but I am sure (as was Kitty) that it wasn't what was listed on the death certificate from Thunderbird Hospital in Phonix - a bowel obstruction.  His father died of a stroke at age 69 but his mother lived to age 95, though beset with dementia for her last year and confined to a nursing home.  There is no telling the age when my maternal grandfather died since the date of his birth in County Kerry is a mystery.  I uncovered 3 different birth years for him when I did my genealogical research for my memoir, 1880 OR 1883 OR 1887.  On the other hand, my maternal grandmother died of pernicious anemia at age 41, when my mother was 6 years old.  So of the men in my familty, my father was the longest-lived and I am coming in second.  I'm reasonably sure that both of us have had our lives extended by controlling our blood pressure by medications.  As DuPont Chemicals used to boast; "Better Living through Chemistry."  If not necessarily 'better,' it's at least longer.   A mixed blessing in light of the toll taken by various chronic illnesses but, in any event, I'm grateful for medications.

My maternal grandmother, Catherine O'Shea Healy, who died at age 41 of pernicious anemia in 1928, when my mother was 6 years old.  Vitamin B12 would have saved her life, but it wasn't easily available until shortly after her death.

Geri's still sick with a bad cough, seemingly worse than yesterday.  She's discouraged by its persistence.

12/27/23

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

In bed at 9:15, up at 4:25, Lilly waking up but not asking to go out.  31°, high of 39° mostly cloudy day ahead,   The wind is NNW at 4 mph, 2-13/20.  High, bright, waning gibbous moon in the west, illumination 100%, shining through our west windows, perversely calling to mind the 1957 sang Dark Moon by Gale Storm and later by Jim Reeves and others   Venus small but bright in the southeast sky. Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:23, 9+0.  Lilly finally went out at about 5:15.

Treadmill; pain. IC during the night was relieved by voiding.  Some tightness in PFM.  I regret missing time on the TM yesterday.  I can only do it when I am pretty free of pelvic pain or discomfort and when I've had enough sleep that I'm not overly concerned about falling on or off it.  I must have had a time yesterday when I could have gotten on it but missed it.   Pain-free this morning at about 10;25 so I got in 20:01 & 0.41 before discomfort caused me to get off.  I watched a documentary on OVID, From Swastika to Jim Crow, about intellectual Jewish refugees from Germany finding teaching jobs at HBCUs in the South and a combination of anti-semitism and xenophobia/white nationalism anti-German sentiment elsewhere.  In the afternoon, I did another 30:32 & 0.65, relieving some of my guilt and disappointment over missing any treadmill time yesterday.😊  I watched Jamie Bernstein deliver a talk at a synagogue in Ridgefield, Conn., where Geri's friend Chris Nolan lives, talking about her book Famous Father Girl

 I'm grateful for the consciousness of gratitude, the awareness of it, even if forced by the adopted habit of writing about it in this journal.  I have such a tendency toward pessimism and cynicism, Mickey-the-Mopeism, such a dark assessment of human history and the human species, it's good to call to mind at least once each day someone or something for whom or for which I am grateful,   My Mickey-the-Mopeism isn't helped by chronic pain and discomfort but, notwithstanding all that botheration, I need to stay aware that I am surrounded by heroes, saints, and miracles.  This was true when I was younger, vigorous, and healthy; it is just as true today.  My life has been richly blessed with good, nurturing people. I have long been aware of the magical, mystical, marvelous, wondrous quality of all that is, from this exquisite, perfect, little mushroom I spotted one day next to our front driveway to the human brain and the never-understood reality of consciousness -  so much for which to be grateful.

1957, Dark Moon, Gale Storm.  1957 was the year I turned 16, 66 or 67 years ago.  Dwight Eisenhower began his second term as President. Ngo Dinh Diem made a state visit to the U.S., which later was complicit in his assassination.  I never suspected that several years later I would spend 234 days in Diem's country, playing a minor role in killing its people and destroying its stuff.  The Soviets beat us into space with Sputnik-1.  Elvis Pressley was already an established star before the year's release of Too Much, All Shook Up, Teddy Bear, and Loving You.  Gale Storm was a big star with her own TV series, My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show, and a recording star with hit records including I Hear You Knocking and the song that popped into my mind this morning, Dark Moon, with its simple, catchy if lugubrious lyrics.  As was common in the 50s, Storm did a couple White 'covers' of songs initially made popular by Black artists, I Hear You Knocking and Why Do Fools Fall in Love.  Probably the most notorious of these White cover artists was Lily White Christian Evangelical Pat Boone, who made ridiculous White covers of Little Richard songs.  As far as I was concerned, then as well as now, he never could pull it off.  Pat belting out "Whop bop b'luma b'lop bam boom"?  Fuhgedaboudit.

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky
Oh, tell me why, oh tell me why
You've lost your splendor
Dark moon, what is the cause your life withdraws
Is it because, is it because I've lost my love

Mortals have dreams of love's perfect schemes
But they don't realize, their love can sometimes bring the

Dark moon, way up high up in the sky . . .

Am I paranoid or just realistic?  I have long realized that though I think of Geri and me as reasonably secure financially with our retirement savings and social security, I am always aware that our nest egg (other than our home) is all on paper reflecting 1s and 0s nestled into programs on computers and thus vulnerable both to hacking, errors, mischief, and even air bursts of weapons that destroy electrical circuits in computers that operate our power grids as well as the compnters that have all our financial records, including retirement accounts, bank accounts, social security and medicare accounts, everything that has to do with us.  The December 19, 2023 issue of The New Yorker contains an article that gives me the shivers: "The Disturbing Impact of the Cyberattack at the British Library."  A ransomware attack, most probably from Russia, has crippled the British Library from October 28th to the present.

The public Wi-Fi wasn’t working, and neither was the online catalogue: it was impossible to use a computer to request a book, access a journal, or listen to any of the library’s millions of audio recordings.  The Web site, phone lines, and all online services—exhibition-ticket sales, reader registrations, card transactions in the gift shop, the electronic nervous system that unified the library’s collections and shared them with the world—were down.

The effect of this attack has been disastrous but it is not catastrophic because, after all, it could all be undone simply by paying the Russian criminals the $850,000 ransom they demand.  Pay the money, buttons are pushed, and the problem is resolved.  What if instead of ransomware, the cause of the system failures was an electromagnetic pulse weapon launched from North Korea, China, or Russia that disabled or destroyed the power grid?  Real catastrophe.  Goodbye financial security, goodbye civilization hello chaos.

Ezra Klein interview of Nimrod Novik.  I listened to this one-hour interview on Klein's podcast.  Novik excoriated Netanyahu and took the position that there must be eventually a 2 state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem.  His statements and arguments are all realistic except it is hard to see how his ultimate solution is possible, at least not without a civil war in Israel.  The settlers and their supporters have practically destroyed any possibility of a Palestinian state.  Nimrob himself pointed out that the West Bank now consists of 189 Palestinian islands each surrounded by settler and IDF-controlled territory.  What kind of state is possible with no contiguity.  Could there be a Palestinian state like a Melanesia or the Maldives?  Hard to conceive of any solution.  

12/26/23

 Tuesday, December 26, 2023

In bed at 11 (too much sugar?), up at 6:30 thinking about Maestro.  Let Lily out (twice), 42°, mostly cloudy day ahead, high of 47°, 14 degrees above average,  Wind is SSW at 8 mph, 5-15/29. 0.3" rain in last 24 hrs.  Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:22, 8+59.     

Treadmill; pain.  I missed my opportunity earlier today and now at night persistent pain/discmfort keeps me off the treadmill.  Rats!      

I'm grateful  this morning for the completion of all the road construction on Port Washington Road and I43 near County Line Road.  I thought of it this morning as I took the trash cart out to the street and looked down County Line to the traffic lights controlling the intersection of County Line and Port Road.  For the first 10 years or so that we lived here, there were stop signs on County Line but no stop signs on Port Road.  At busy times during the day, we had to wait a long time to gain access to Port Road.  Once the heavy construction started, the intersection was made a 4-way stop and access improved dramatically.  Why hadn't those stop signs on Port Road been put up before then???  Now we have traffic lights aw well as newly-paved and widened roadways, plus much improved entrance ramps both southboud on I43 as before and now northbound as well, and an exit ramp where before we had none.  It was a long wait for the construction to be completed in our neck of the woods, but I am grateful for the results.

Geri is still not well, coughing in bed during the night and still this mornng It makes my heart ache.  How is it that I am still uninfected, either by the covid that plagued her for almost a month or by her current infection?  Tonight we drove to Walgreens and picked up a prescription for an anti-biotic and some cough medication that didn't contain codeine which Dr. Baugrud said she couldn't authorize over the phone. 

  

From How Lea Ypi Defines Freedom by Han Zhang in the 12/26/23 NewYorker:

At a talk in Chicago earlier this year, she reminded her audience that democracy is a “demanding ideal.” Our current system, she went on, “is not really democracy: we have constellations and configurations of interests that are very powerful . . . you have a world where strong states shape the fates of weaker states. You have countries where stronger citizens with more money shape the fates of weaker citizens.” When I met her, she told me, “I want to get away from this idea that, because you have an election, democracy is secure. It’s not a finish line.”

Ypi sees “an obvious discrepancy between the ideology of freedom and ideal freedom.” In the absence of the real thing, the word is often invoked as a license to disregard the well-being of others: to refuse to wear masks during a covid surge; to flaunt civilian ownership of assault weapons at a time when mass shootings outnumber the days of the year; to voice anti-trans rhetoric that fuels real-world violence and suicides. Ypi has a refreshing insistence on the responsibility that freedom entails. “There’s a dimension of freedom that’s not just about satisfaction, but it’s about placing your desires in a moral context and in the context of relationship to other people, and saying, ‘Well, what makes sense for all of us?’ ” Ypi told me. In a 2019 article for the New Statesman, she echoed Plato’s warning, in “The Republic,” that the demagogue, the “man of the people” in thrall to his desires and whims, is a perennial threat to democracy. Failure to work toward the freedom of others, she pointed out, leaves the door open to populists like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. 

Before she left for college, she had promised her father not to study Marxism. But her experience of the forms of unfreedom that persisted in liberal societies eventually pushed her to reëngage with the tradition of socialism. During her pursuit of a Ph.D., she began to explore “the possibility of reconciling Kant and Marx” and their common ground in society’s search for freedom.

Ypi thinks that economic migrants should be seen as akin to refugees or political-asylum seekers. The lack of employment opportunities that drive them to leave their home countries are almost always the result of historical oppression and exploitation. Politicians should frame economic migration as “an implication of global injustice,” she says. If freedom of movement is a right worth defending, she argues, liberal societies can’t condemn countries like North Korea that prevent citizens from leaving while closing their own borders and imprisoning immigrants.

I was struck by the phrase "the forms of unfreedom that persist in liberal societies" and  her recognition that "Our current system, she went on, “is not really democracy: we have constellations and configurations of interests that are very powerful . . . you have a world where strong states shape the fates of weaker states. You have countries where stronger citizens with more money shape the fates of weaker citizens.”  She recognizes the Cynical Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

VA Whole Health video seession with Melinda at 19 this morning.  

Homelessness in Phoenix.  There is a long feature story in today's NYT on this challenge and its effect on local businesses surrounded by tent encampments providing shelter to homeless people with severe mental health problems, opioid addiction, and what have you.  The description of the hazards of living on the street is scary.  There are as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors in Phoenix each night,    according to the story.  That number seems way too low.  The story also says that the population of the Phoenix area grows by about 25,000 every year, including hundreds of humoeless.  The number of homeless has more than tripled since 2016.  These are the people that my sister Kitty uded to feed at André House.  Quaere: why do Phoenix and Arizona contunue to support population growth when the availability of water is a growing problem, when polluting traffic on I10, the 101, 202, and 303 is such a problem with a polluted pall of smog literally floating over the valley, and when the city's mentally ill, and addicted homeless population is such a problem.  The Phoenix metro population in 2023 is more than 4.7 million people and the population growth for years has been averaging more than 1.5%.  This strikes me as lunacy.

 

 

12/25/23

 Monday, December 25, 2023

In bed by 10, awake at 4:55.  Let Lilly out.  45°, high of 48°, rain expected late afternoon and most of the night.  Wind SSE at 10 mph, 9-18/33. 0.5" of rain expected in the next 24 hours.  Sunrise at 7:22, sunset at 4:21, 8+59.  This date last year:   3 degrees outside, high of 11, wind out of the NW at 16 mph, wind chill 16 below zero.

Pain; treadmill.  Woke up with left shoulder and midback pain, tightness in lower back & PF.   30:08 & 0.65 listening to a podcast on YouTube on Mahler's 2nd "Resurrection" Symphony.  

I'm grateful for being a member of families today though Geri & I are flying solo today.  Birth family, extended family, families by marriage, all enriching and supporting.  I'm thinking of the Kovacs family in Geretshried that has taken Sarah in as one of their own and of the Hoanh family that has done the same to Andy.  I'm thinking of my niece Chrissi in Arizona and worrying that she hasn't contacted me after getting the toffee we sent which was delivered on the 21st and after getting my text message this morning which was delivered at 9:53 a.m.  I send the coffee in memory and honor of my dear sister who I know would want me to keep in touch with her family after her passing.

Kitty's wedding which I missed because of a field exercise at USMA West Point, 

Maestro  We watched Bradley Cooper's movie this afternoon, or rather, Geri watched the first half and I the whole movie.  I didn't care much for the first half.  Cooper's Leonard Bernstein seemed larger than life, though it was probably the case that he was larger than life.  I am a little surprised that I didn't know that he was bisexual and mostly homosexual.  There were several captivating scenes in the film including the scene in which the maestro conducted Mahler's 2nd Symphony, but my attention was held mostly by Carrie Mulligan's portrayal of Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein and the challenge of being married to Bernstein.  It was interesting that the credits for the movie listed Mulligan above Cooper though Cooper had the title role, directed the film, and was one of the producers of the film (along with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

Geri's sick today, seemingly sicker than yesterday.  I think she may be paying a price for her cooking and baking efforts over the last two days, but you can't keep a good woman down.  She is still beset with the coughing and discolored mucous this evening which at least suggests that it is a separate infection and not a continuation of the covid.  Whatever it is, she is suffering with it.  It's been a rough 4 or 5 weeks for her.  

    It has been a quiet day here.  No visitors though we are hoping that Steve will drive up from Chicago tomorrow.  He's concerned that Geri has what she has been calling laryngitis because of her hoarseness, though I don't think it's really laryngitis.  He'll check on her condition in the morning and hopefully decide to come up.  I always enjoy his visits not only because he always seems to help us with some stuff we are not able to do ourselves (like schlepping 40-pound bags of water softening salt, etc.) but because he is so incredibly bright and well-informed and a pleasure to schmooze with.  I call him my doppelganger because of our similar range of interests.  All of our children are bright as can be (I say modestly.😀)

12/24/23

 December 24, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 3:30.  Let Lilly out into the cloudy, damp 42° morning, high today is forecast as 47°, 13° above average, hazy conditions expected much of the afternoon, wind SE at 4 mph, 2-13/25.  Sunrise at 7:21, sunset at 4:21, 8+59.    

Treadmill; pain.   No significant pain from 3:30 till noon.  30:12 &0.60, while watching Democracy Now on YouTube: an interview of Masha Gessen on the controversy surrounding her essay in The New Yorker "In the Shadow of the Holocaust," her receiving the Hannah Arendt Award from the Heinrich Boll Foundation, and the withdrawal by the City of Bremen, Germany, and its university of site for the presentation of the award.  Gessen's article described the similarities between what happened in Gaza before and after October 7th and the isolation and then liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.   

I'm grateful for my wife, especially at Christmastime.  I'm grateful that she reminds me so much of the other two women in my life who have meant so much to me, my mother and my sister.  In my early morning, pre-dawn conversations with my sister, I would only half-jokingly refer to the two of them as Sts. Mary and Kitty of Emerald Avenue, or of Englewood.  So now I live with St. Geri of Oak Park.  Each of them was/is so incredibly strong, and so good, and their strength and goodness were especially visible at Christmastime.

    I don't remember much of Christmases when I was a little boy.  I was 10 days shy of my 4th birthday when Japan finally surrendered and WWII ended.  Three months later, my father returned from the war, wrecked.  I don't remember much of those Christmases in the late 40s and early 50s except that we always observed them.  There was always a tree with presents under it on Christmas Eve when we opened them.  What I do remember is that my father was an emotional and spiritual wreck during those years.  He had survived the brutality of the Marine Corps and the carnage on Iwo Jima, but barely.  He had no joy in living, even at, and perhaps especially at Christmas.  After the war in which millions of humans had killed millions of humans, he knew better than to believe all that "Joy to the world" and "God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay' stuff.  That my sister and I could still get excited every Christmas was attributable entirely to my mother who believed in the Christmas story, in the Church, and in God.  Like a mother hen, she protected Kitty and me from the dark place where my father's spirit dwelled.  We had no money during most of the time we lived in our 3-room basement apartment.  My father couldn't hold onto a job and our only reliable income came from my mother's job as a waitress, relying mostly on tips.  There was no bank account, checking or savings.  We paid our bills with money orders bought at the neighborhood 'currency exchange' on Halsted Street.  When I was old enough, my mother would give me the cash and I would purchase the money orders and bring them back to her.  She bought our clothes through Dave Fein, a 'factor' or middleman, a door-to-door, human credit card.  We sometimes didn't have enough cash for food, and I would be sent to Mr. Kelly's little grocery store on 73rd Street to get what we needed for lunch and dinner on credit.  He 'kept a tab' for us and when money became available, we paid the tab.   But there was always a tree and always presents on Christmas and somehow, in those very hard days, my mother managed to keep our spirits up, singing "Jingle Bells," "Santa Claus is coming to town," and our favorite "Silent Night."  My Uncle Jim, God rest his soul, gave me my first bicycle one Christmas, a green J. C. Higgins, from Montgomery Ward   But for my sister and me, it was our mother who was our hero, our guardian angel, our saint.

My sister Kitty followed in her footsteps.  She too was a mother hen to her son and daughter.  Thankfully their father was not the wreck our father had been but he admits to leaving all the child-rearing to Kitty.  My mother worked as a waitress most of our childhood; Kitty worked as a cleaning lady for elderly clients in Phoenix's West Valley.  Most of her elderly clients became her friends and came to rely on her for much more than cleaning services.  She got to know some of her clients' children who resided in other states and became the person those children would call to check on their parents.  She helped their parents as they dealt with cognitive decline and dementia.  She belonged to St. Raphel Parish and for many years was a leader in the parish's St. Vincent de Paul program, distributing money and food to people in need.  Her husband Jim would make the rounds with her, personally delivering bags of food.  I 'made the rounds' with her at least once during a visit.  As Christmas approached each year, Kitty managed an "Adopt a Family' program that matched families that needed help providing Christmas presents for their children with families that wanted to help.  Each year, Kitty spent countless hours on the telephone with each of the families, obtaining lists of what the children wanted and what they needed, including exact sizes for clothing gifts, and passing the information on to the families who went out and purchased the gifts and wrapped them.  Kitty and Jim delivered them and one year, during one of my visits,  I helped with the deliveries.  Every month, she traveled to downtown Phoenix to work in the kitchen at André House, a ministry to the homeless, preparing and serving hot meals to hundreds of men and women living on the streets or in shelters. She was a wonderful human being, a Christian in the Matthew 25: 31-46 sense of the word, and like her mother, a hero and a saint.  

    Even with all her commitments as 'the cleaning lady,' as the linchpin of the Adopt a Family program, and as a leader in SVDP, she made a big deal of Christmas in her home, decorating the house and hosting a big family holiday meal.  She had a large collection of Hummel Christmas tree ornaments that she had acquired over the years and, toward the end of her life, she was concerned about what would become of the little porcelains after she was gone.  Neither of her children wanted them and she offered them to Sarah, her niece and goddaughter, and was thrilled when Sarah accepted them.  Getting them to Germany turned out to be quite a project but the exchange was successful and the Hummels stayed in the family, as Kitty had hoped.  Sarah kindly gave three of them to us.

My wife, too, is an inspiration to me, especially at Christmas.  I admire her strength and her goodness.  I omit listing most examples here out of respect for her sense of privacy and her modesty, but I can at least make mention that she shares the mother-hen qualities of my mother and sister.  Her solicitude for her sons, her attention to their health and well-being and to their education as they were growing up has continued to the present day.  Each of them loves her deeply and she deserves it.  She has maintained many lifelong friendships, some going back 60 years, others 'merely' many decades.  Her friends are scattered from Dublin, Ireland to Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Illinois, but they keep in touch by telephone and some come to Wisconsin and stay in our home to be near her and share time with her.  She often visits another friend in Milwaukee who is suffering from a serious illness and another recently widowed.  When her brother was widowed and alone in a distant state and dealing with age-related challenges, she wrote him a long, detailed, heartfelt letter inviting him to come to live near us and when he did, she cared for him for almost 4 years until he moved to be closer to his daughter and son-in-law.  In earlier years she volunteered at the Milwaukee Literacy Center, teaching others to read, and as a volunteer ombudsman at a nursing home.  She spent years working as a mediator and investigator for the Family Court in Jefferson County, doing all that she could to ensure the welfare of children in divorce cases.  She is a good and wise person and it is no surprise that her children, her friends, and I seek her counsel as we move through life.  I omit much from this note only because of respect for her sense of privacy which is more refined than mine but I assert that she shares much of the strength and goodness that my mother and my sister had and that though I am unworthy of each and all of them, I am grateful.  

    Geri and I have shared 36 Christmases and for 35 of them, she has assembled her Little Village under our Christmas tree, a tiny but elaborate collection of miniature buildings and accessories spread out on a bed of cotton snow.  Putting it all together is quite a construction project, accomplished by Geri lying on the floor and working under the tree.  This year, as Geri has completed her recovery from a recent case of covid but now is enduring a nasty cold, there is no Little Village.  I miss it but I'm glad Geri didn't jeopardize her health re-constructing it.  

Tom Friedman on Gaza in this morning's NYT.  Excerpts:

It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love/

It is time for the Biden administration to give Israel more than just gentle nudges about how it would be kind of, sort of nice if Israel could fight this war in Gaza without killing thousands of civilians.

It’s time for the U.S. to stop wasting time searching for the perfect U.N. cease-fire resolution on Gaza.

It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel that its war’s aim of wiping Hamas off the face of the earth is not going to be achieved — at least not at a cost that the U.S. or the world will tolerate, or that Israel should want.

It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel how to declare victory in Gaza and go home, because right now the Israeli prime minister is utterly useless as a leader: He is — unbelievably — prioritizing his own electoral needs over the interests of Israelis, not to mention the interests of Israel’s best friend, President Biden. 

It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel to put the following offer on the table to Hamas: total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, in return for all the Israeli hostages and a permanent cease-fire under international supervision, including U.S., NATO and Arab observers. And no exchange of Palestinians in Israeli jails.

It sounds good to me though I doubt that there is anything that Israel and the U.S. can do to regain the respect of the civilized world.  There is too much innocent blood on each nation's hands.

Masha Gessen: In the Shadow of the Holocaust in the New Yorker:

For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.

The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own. 

Jews took up arms in 1948 to claim land that was offered to them by a United Nations decision to partition what had been British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported by surrounding Arab states, did not accept the partition and Israel’s declaration of independence. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, starting what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the fighting. Those who did not were driven out of their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians remember 1948 as the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. That the comparison is unavoidable has compelled many Israelis to assert that, unlike the Jews, Palestinians brought their catastrophe on themselves. 

 

The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.  Ellis has a fever and pink eye and is contagious until tomorrow.  Lyn will stay at home with her tonight,  Maribeth canceled because Lyn won't be able to drive her home.  Dinner tonight will be David, Sharon, Geri, and me.  Correction!  Sharon didn't want to leave Lyn alone on Christmas Eve so (1) she and David came over for hors d'oevres; (2) Sharon drove back to their house with containers of tenderloin, mashed potatoes, and asparagus for her and Lyn and then' (3) we all connected on Zoom to eat dinner together, just remotely, after which (4) we all watched Ellis leave her sick bed to open her Christmas presents from Nona after which (5) Sharon drove back to our house to pick up David and pieces of Geri's cherry pie and pumpkin pie to take back to their house to enjoy with Lyn.  Life in the 2020s with modern technology.

12/23/23

 Saturday, December 23, 2023

In bed at 10, up at 5:40.  Let Lilly out.  40°, high of 44°, cloudy damp day today w/ average humidity of 95%, Dense Fog Advisory until 11 a.m., wind is NNE at 3 mph, 1-5/10.  Sunrise at 7:21, sunset at 4:20, 8+59.  Today's daylight is 4 seconds longer than yesterday's!  Wepre on our way to the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice.

Treadmill; pain.  30.18 & 0.65 at 11 a.m., watched Thich Nhat Hanh: The Art of Mindful Living, Part 1.  I had considerable PFP afterward, hoping it's not caused by the treadmill exercise.  Also some transient leg and back pain on the treadmill.

I'm grateful for cameras, from my first, the Agfa 35mm SLR my Uncle Bud brought back from Germany after the Second World War to the one built into my iPhone12ProMax, which I use promiscuously.  I see a lovely leaf on the ground and I want a photo of it.  I see a handsome or stately or elegant tree and I want a photo of it.  I have more than 1,000 photos on my phone.  If I were more disciplined, I would organize them into discrete albums to make searching for individual photos easier.  I've started with an album of my drawings and paintings, but I should break that album into 2 albums, one for each genre.  I need a separate album for old photos of my birth family.  An album, or two, for trees and leaves, etc.

This morning's dense fog reminds me of another morning with dense fog, about 45 years ago.  I had been trying for some time to get a good photo of a beautiful crabapple tree in Lake Park, not with its gorgeous pink blossoms in the Spring but 'nude', before the leaves and blossoms came out.  But in each photo I took the shapes of the tree and its branches were compromised by the bushes and trees in the background.  I tried to blur the background clutter by setting the aperture of the lens at its widest opening, but still the background clutter ruined the photos.  One morning I was awakened early by the fog horn at the Lake Park lighthouse located down Newberry Boulevard from our house.  I thought "This is my chance," crawled out of bed, grabbed my camera bag, drove down to the park, walked to the little glade where the tree lived, lay down on my belly on the cold, wet ground of the downslope east of the tree, opened the aperture, and got my shot.  My wife probably thought I was nuts, but what a beautiful photo of a beautiful tree, with all the background clutter shrouded by the dense fog.  The photo hangs on the wall above the headboard of my bed, giving me pleasure every time I see it.

LTMW at the berry-laden tree along County Line Road, I see what I think is a flock of cedar waxwings.  I can't tell for sure in the fog and because of the distance, but their size and behavior clearly suggest cedar waxwings.

I'm thinking about 9/11 today and why Osama bin Laden and his band of followers hate(d) the U.S. and selected the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the Capitol as targets.  I recall all the TV networks and other news media asking 'Why do they hate us?' and we, the populace being so incredulous that anyone would hate our great democratic 'city on a hill,' which we are incllined to think of as an inspiration  and model  for all lesser nations.  I'm thinking of it as most of the rest of the world  reads and hears news of near famine in Gaza and disease spreading like wildfire, considers Israel to be engaging in illegal group punishment, sacrificing old men and women, mothers and children to satisfy a bloodlust of revenge for Hamas' attack on October 7th and sees the United States as the enabler of all the suffering, sees Biden and Neanyahu (the single biggest opponent of peace between Israelis and Palestinians for the last 40 years) literally embracing after the onslaught began, sees Secretaries Blinken and Austin uttering hollow platitudes about minimizing civilain casualties and respecting the rules of warfare, and sees the U.S. vetoing UN Security Council resolutions calling for a humanitarian ceasefire.  Is it not almost guaranteed that there will be more global eanimus towards Israel, more anti-semitism, and more terrorists produced by Israel's war on Gaza than there was on October 6th?  Can it really be a big surprise that so many young Democrats are down on Biden.

Five Years Ago - a video that Andy and Anh set out of the kids - soo much younger - singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."

12/22/23

 Friday, December 22, 2023

In bed @ 10, awake at 3:37 and up at 4:01.  Let Lilly out.  40°, high of 44°, cloudy, rainy evening ahead, AQI of 87, wind SSE at 5 mph, 3-6/10. Sunrise at 7:20, sunset at 4:19, 8+59.

Treadmill; pain.  Woke up with midback pain and I'm having some RP this morning.   I'm thinking of taking a day off with the treadmill, not enough sleep, and risk of falling on or off the contraption.  0:00 & 0.00 

I'm grateful for my mother.     

Mildred Pierce.  "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." King Lear, Act I, scene 4.  The novel and this HBO miniseries seem like a Great Depression-era amalgamation of Shakespeare's  King Lear and Balzac's Le Pere Goriot.  Veda Pierce is the daughter of Mildred Pierce.  Even as a child, she dreamed of that form of the American Dream in which she, though the child of a middle-class divorceé forced to work as a waitress in a 'hash house.' would achieve fame, fortune, and social status through her classical music talents.  She hated living in Glendale, California, in LA's San Fernando Valley, hated the house the family lived in, and even hated Mildred when she was forced to take a job as a waitress to feed and house Veda and her little sister Ray.  Ray dies from influenza and a concurrent infection, leaving Mildren feeling guilty because she was off with a rich lover when Ray became sick and was hospitalized.  Ray's death also makes Mildred more solicitous of her relationship with Veda, who takes advantage of Mildred's love and yearning for her daughter's respect, just as Veda takes advantage of everyone to advance her own cause.  She reminds me of a young Donald Trump, selfish, narcissistic, sociopathic.  The storyline portrays Mildred's rise and fall as a businesswoman and her relationship with the thankless Veda whom she finally 'kisses off' as she realizes what a snake Veda is.

 The story reminded me of my mother and the many years she worked as a waitress in the 1940s and 50s, working for little pay and tips, or, at her last waitressing job at a supper club called The Barn, working for no pay and only tips, presumably on the theory that the waitresses were not employees but rather independent contractors.  Here is some of what I wrote about my mother in my memoir:

My mother was the steady (if low income) wage earner in the family as my father bounced from job to job.  I have a fuzzy but I think accurate) memory of her taking in laundry and ironing in our basement apartment when I was very young, probably at the end of and immediately after the war.  During most of my childhood, however, my mother worked as a waitress.  She started working days at a luncheonette owned by Greeks at the southeast corner of 74th and Halsted Street.   Kitty and I would go from St. Leo Grammar School to “the Greeks” to have lunch, usually PB&J, each day during the school year.  I’m sure her income from that job was extremely paltry.  Her tips would have been nickels and dimes.  When she had enough experience to get a better paying job, she worked at a small restaurant called “Kilty’s” at 1111 W. 79th Street, not far from where my Uncle Bud and Aunt Mary lived.  She moved up from there to an Italian restaurant called “Louis George’s” and finally to a very fancy supper club at 81st and Central Avenue in Burbank called (a bit perversely) “The Old Barn.”  The other restaurants ‘bit the dust’ as the South Side lost virtually all its white residents, but the Barn is still operating as an elegant eatery.

The job at ‘the Greeks’ was a daytime job; all the others involved evening and night work.   My mother didn’t drive until later in life and, until I got my driver’s license at 16 or so, my father would drive her to work and pick her up.  Once I could drive, I would bring her to and from work.  I remember her meticulously preparing her uniforms and polishing her white ‘nurse’s shoes’ each afternoon.  At Louis George’s, she wore what was supposed to be some sort of Italian provincial outfit, with a colorful full skirt and a white blouse with big starched puffy short sleeves.

At The Old Barn, she wore a plain nylon black uniform with bleached and starched white collar and apron.  Each evening, she would walk into work looking energetic and professional; each night, or at least on the busy nights, when I picked her up she would drag herself out of the restaurant bone tired and often exhausted.  Her arms and shoulders hurt from lifting and carrying the heavy food trays.  Her legs hurt from all the standing and walking.  Mostly though, it was her feet that ached until the following morning.  The waitresses wore nylon stockings in their ‘nurses shoes’, not cushioning cotton socks.  Often my mother could hardly wait to get her shoes untied and off her feet as she settled into the passenger seat of the car and started rubbing her overtaxed feet.  Then we would drive home where she could get some rest on the sleeper sofa that was her bed all the years we lived in the basement apartment.

I state the obvious: waiting on tables in a restaurant is very hard work.  The waitress is the interface between the customer and the other workers at the restaurant.  She is in one sense in charge of the tables at her station, but she has no real authority.  She must depend on bus boys and bartenders and the kitchen staff to make things go smoothly.  If there is a shortage of bus boys, the waitress has to bus the tables as well as take orders and serve drinks and food.  If the bartenders screw up the drink orders, or take too long to fill drink orders, the waitress gets the heat.  If the kitchen staff is slow or uncoordinated or unskilled in food preparation, again it’s the waitress who hears about it from the customers, both verbally and by diminished or missing tips.  At The Old Barn, my mother worked only for tips, no wages.  If there were problems at the bar or in the kitchen, she was the one to suffer the consequences.

As she worked her way up to ‘classier’ establishments, she encountered fewer and fewer customers who were cheap or jerks, but she did occasionally get one.  I would hear about it on the drive home.

I wrote earlier that there were times when paying the $1.50/month tuition at St. Leo Grammar School or $15.00/month tuition at Leo High School was a source of friction between my mother and my father.  My mother would not hear of Kitty and me attending a public school.  I have often thought of how hard she worked to ensure that we got what she saw as the only proper education.  I have always attributed my obtaining a scholarship to college and eventually being able to attend law school and to be appointed to a university faculty to her work as a waitress all those years.  I am usually a generous tipper.

I treasure the memory of those rides with my mother to and from work.  They provided a great opportunity to talk and we did a lot of talking.  I have to pause as I write these words and think back on those rides, especially the long rides to and from The Old Barn.   It was a blessing that we had only one car.  In a modern two or more car family, there would not be the need or the forced opportunity for sharing the vehicle and for the riding and schmoozing together.  Efficiency would be enhanced; togetherness would be sacrificed.  I treasure too the shared time with my mother on the long drive over pre-interstate roads from the south side of Chicago to visit Uncle Jim in ‘the loony bin’ in Elgin.  

I should state what is perhaps clear from the story of my mother’s ‘career path’ as a waitress, i.e., that she was a very good waitress.  She had regular customers who asked to be seated at her station and waited until one of her tables became available.  It wasn’t only that she was a professional at serving diners that brought the customers back, it was her personality.  She was friendly and upbeat and very easy to like.  The customers liked her, the other waitresses and staff at the restaurants liked her and, of course, the bosses liked her both because she was so likable and because she was very good for business.

Eventually, the nighttime and weekend hours and the wear and tear on her body made her want to get out of the waitress business.  Sometime during my college years, when she would have been about 40 years old and when the family was living in an apartment in the Marquette Park neighborhood, my mother took a job at a General Foods plant at 74th and Rockwell Avenue, walking distance from the family’s apartment.  The plant was built in 1949 and shut down in the summer of 2003.  It was quite huge, 350,000 square feet.  Originally it manufactured only Kool-Aid, but after it was bought by General Foods (now Kraft) in 1953, it also made Good Seasonings salad dressings, Shake ‘N Bake, Open Pit BarBQ Sauce and some other products.  My mother worked in the main plant, but I can’t remember what her job was.  Eventually, however, there was an opening in the Quality Control Laboratory and she applied for it and got the job.  She had to pass a mathematics test to get the job, which made this Depression era high school dropout more than a little nervous.  Nonetheless, she worked hard at getting ready for the test, passed it, and moved off the assembly line into the Lab.  We were all proud of her.  That was the job she held until she died.

 

As I read these words that I wrote about 20 years ago, I pause as I remember those days with my mother, grateful for her love and sacrifices for me and my sister, and rueful that I wasn't a better son.  Yeats' Vacillation haunts me, "my conscience or my vanity appalled."  My mother was a much finer person than Mildred Pierce and I was a much better son than Veda was as a daughter, but still, I could have and should have been better.

Why keep a journal?   I've wondered about this many times and I've written about it a few times.  In this morning's NYT, Frank Bruni has an essay titled "Our Semicolons, Ourselves.  Excerpts:

Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.

Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear. That’s why so many people keep journals. They want more than just a record of what’s happening in their lives. They want to make sense of it.

Bruni's comments remind me of the Flannery O'Connor quote in a letter she wrote, a comment that I believe to be true of me: ". . . .  I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again."  I don't expect anyone but me to read my blog/journal and so far I haven't been disappointed nor do I expect to be.  That being the case, I often tolerate my run-on and otherwise awkward sentences to remain uncorrected. I'm also a fan of non-sentences, part sentences.  It seems to me that we often, maybe usually, think in non-sentences and talk that way so why not when the occasion permits write that way too.  My biggest fault is wordiness, way too many unnecessary words which my good friend, now deceased, David Branch would line through ruthlessly with his red editing ballpoint.  Often I would follow his writing advice and often I wouldn't.  Sometimes I would like the words too much to excise them, even if they were a bit redundant and unnecessary.  David was a graduate of Yale undergraduate school and Harvard law, a very bright and well-educated guy.  I always took his editing advice seriously, even when I eschewed it.  He would probably advise me to eschew the word eschew.  I daresay he would also find troubling my frequent use of hyphenated words and occasionally random use of capitalized initial letters in words that oughtn't be capitalized, yes in German but not in English.  Nonetheless, one of the advantages of writing that has no readers other than the author is that you can do stuff like that.   Dear David Branch would run out of red ink going over my writing in this journal.  How I wish he were still with us.

On these days last year we were under a blizzard watch (12/21), and a storm watch (12/22), and on the 23rd, the temperature never rose above zero.  

Geri tests negative for covid but has a nasty cold and cough, but she's still planning on hosting David, Sharon, Ellis, and Mary Beth for dinner on Christmas Eve.

Throne room reading is the current print issue of The Atlantic devoted entirely to Reconstruction.  Also watching and listening to the Fisk Jubilee Singers at the Kennedy Center, having read the choral group's history in this issue.  My friend, now deceased, Father Matthew Gottschalk at the House of Peace, attended Fisk University.

Vi and Joey Officer came over with the kringle I ordered to support George and Henry's scout programs.

Trevor Noah has some stand-up shows on YouTube and we watched one before bedtime.  Talented man.