David’s
t-shirt was boldly lettered Wall University. David, my son; Toni, my
daughter-in-law; and Jacob, my grandson flew in from Seattle to celebrate some March
birthdays. Jacob turned a tall twenty, while his cousin Matt Veldman turned a
tall twenty-two. Doris, my mom, was born 112 years ago. March is the month for
my ninety-first, and for the birthdays of Ernie Bennett, Rachel Murphy, Kate
Graham and other nifty people.
The t-shirt
that began as a family joke had new vibes this time, because Trump University
has become a sort of national joke. David and family stayed at Chicago’s Trump
Tower two or three times. I was never there, but I did sleep in Trump’s lavish
Palm Beach home before he did. His resort began as the home of Marjorie Merriweather
Post. Her husband, stockbroker E. F. Hutton, invited me there when I was a
young reporter in the 1940s. I still feel my embarrassment when I learned that
the butler had unpacked my unsuitable suitcases. Hutton apologized that only a
few of the servants had arrived from his New York estate. He was making do with what he called a skeleton staff of 16 instead of the normal 40.
Hutton never
ran for president but he did try to buy the U.S. Post Office system. He thought
he could make a profit on all those 3-cent stamps. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a
noted stamp collector, would not play.
The mail
carrier brought me another t-shirt this week. It marks the 60th
anniversary of the founding of Chaminade University in Honolulu. I was chairman
of the Board of Regents of what was Chaminade College of Honolulu for three
years in the early 1960s. I was editor of the daily newspaper on the Big Island
when my Chaminade work began. One of the corporate bosses, who thought
Catholics were a menace, warned me to attend Chaminade meetings on Oahu at my
own expense. Catholics were free to pray, he acknowledged, but Nobody was
listening.
What a
different world that was. Some feared that if John F. Kennedy were elected
president, the pope would be his boss. Some now fear that Donald Trump will be
elected and be his own boss.
Before long
I’ll be posting a new address. Marie and Mark are taking another step in
downsizing. When five kids and their friends were living here, the house and
the pool and the gallon jugs of milk didn’t seem so big. We’re going to
relocate in another part of Orland Park, to a house that’s just the right size.
When I left my condo a couple of years ago I gave away more than a thousand
books, and it was no more difficult that having part of my brain amputated. Now
I’m relocating a few remaining titles. I wrote The Spirit of Cardinal Bernardin, and it was published in three
editions. I contributed a chapter to a book by Candida Lund, chancellor of Dominican
University, who awarded me an honorary doctorate long ago, and I was editor in
chief of the American Catholic Who’s Who
for a while.
The other day I received a royalty check in the amount of $2.95.
The company had sold one copy of my little book about my early experience with
OPCA, olivopontocerebellar atrophy, which the medical field found so hard to
spell that they changed the name of the disease to multiple system atrophy. It
is still incurable, but now it is pronounceable.
Most of the
books I read these days are on my Kindle. My latest Kindle is called a Fire,
and I’m confident Amazon knows why. The Fire is one of the miracles of our
times, a sort of sub-miracle inspired by the computer.
Without Fire
and Dell and H-P and the like, life would be a cold, not cool, experience for
those of us with multiple system atrophy. MSA doesn’t yield readily to a
patient’s relationship with computers. It is the mother of typos, and derails a
train of thought, word by fading word, before the writer can get to the end of
a sentence. Dizziness is a totally inadequate word to describe the swirling brainspin
of MSA.
When the
next chapter of this benevolent blog appears will depend on when we move, and how much movement MSA will allow at the keyboard. My
favorite but elderly desktop computer has crashed. The Dell laptop in front of
me now is dandy, but when the desktop died it took my PageMaker with it. Adobe’s
last major release of PageMaker was in 2001, when I bought mine from Best Buy.
It was a happy choice for 15 years.
