henry's letters: February 19, 2023

Dear everyone,

Can you believe these were out before Feb 14 in Chicago!

This letter is about a week late – for good reason. I’m leaving Wednesday for a three day aikido seminar in Sofia, Bulgaria, and then meeting up with Cindy and Lucas in Thessaloniki, Greece for another 6 days. Aikido politics is why I’m going to Bulgaria – Ed Germanov, the head of the club there is also a former student of Fumio Toyoda, and it is through his organization that we get our Dan certificates from Japan. I don’t know how many more years of aikido I have in me, and I feel obligated to go at least once. He will have a high ranking Japanese sensei there as a ‘guest star’. There are a surprising number of Americans going, including Bob Garza, the head of my dojo, but also people I know from Massachusetts, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico.

Another reason for this trip is that Sofia is only about a three hour drive from Thessaloniki (in olden days it was known as Salonika). I have never been in northern Greece. Salonika had a pretty big Jewish population before WW2, and was well known as a Jewish intellectual center in the 19^th century. Olga Tokarczk even mentions it in the Books of Jacob. (We are reading one of her other few English translated works for book club, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - - I’ve read it twice now, and wish I knew more about William Blake). Anyway, we plan of visiting some Philip and Alexander the Great related archeological sites, but another reason we are going is that I have been thinking about getting a ‘Golden Visa’ for some time now. The program in Greece is relatively inexpensive and otherwise (allegedly) pretty streamlined. Also, northern Greece might not be so badly affected by climate change as Portugal and Spain. Thessaloniki is the second biggest city in Greece, and possibly a transportation hub. So we will be giving a side-eye to maybe buying a condo here (which perhaps we would use as a rental property). It might be worthwhile to have an escape valve if things in the US devolve, although I can’t say that Europe is really much of an improvement. Still, even if we have property in Greece, we would have visas to live elsewhere in Europe.

On to events of the past three weeks. The mother of Joan Dehnert, the manager of my aikido school, died while I was skiing in Colorado, but the wake was held in Huntley, Illinois (way northwest of the city) on the weekend I got back. Joan’s Mom had had dementia, and had been living in a memory care facility in Woodstock. Just as we were pulling off the highway, either Cindy or I remarked that Bruce and Barbara Patterson had moved up to Woodstock last summer. Cindy called them up as we were driving to the funeral home, and we made a date to meet them at Holzlager Brewing after we made our appearance at the wake. We stayed about thirty minutes, and then drove north on highway 47. The brewery was quite reasonably priced, and the beer was very good. We had a good couple of hours chat with the Pattersons before going home. Their new property is several acres big, with plenty of room for their dogs to run around in. But it is a long train ride into the city for the now retired Bruce (1x per week) and an even longer commute for Barbara (2.5 hr one way twice per week) to get to her teaching duties at Loyola.

The other main concern of mine over the last few weeks has been health issues. To go way back, after the pandemic I noticed bladder discomfort, especially during/after aikido, where you take a lot of falls and rolls. I got this worked up (by CT) at the end of 2022, and it turned out I had a bladder stone and an enlarged prostate. So, I was scheduled for laser lithotripsy and prostate resection Tuesday, Feb 7. Meanwhile, I had to get some basic labs drawn and a pre-op EKG (since I am older than 60). Well, the EKG showed some non-specific ‘T’’ wave abnormalities, so I had to get a cardiac stress test as well (which also showed some abnormalities, but nothing pathological). Meanwhile, I also noticed a floater in my right eye (initially I thought there was a fruit fly in the car with me), which luckily turned out to be in my vitreous and not a retinal detachment, according to my optometrist. Being retired seems to mean having a lot of medical and dental issues!

Finally the date of the big surgery arrived. We were late getting to the hospital (the Christ outpatient center) because of IDOT working on the road just after the tollway off-ramp, which didn’t help my blood pressure. Anyway, it did not matter because they took me into surgery around 1 pm (about 1.5 hrs late), the surgery was done by 2, but I didn’t get out of the recovery room until 4 - - I always seem to come out of anesthesia slowly.

I got sent home with an Foley catheter. The first day after surgery was pretty miserable, compounded by the fact that I had strained my back the week before doing deadlifts, and I was so dehydrated from being NPO the day before. I drank copious amounts of fluids, and tried to find positions where I could sit comfortably with my leg bag and not hurt my back. Sleeping was also difficult, because I tend to thrash a lot while I sleep, and you can’t really do this with a tube sticking out of you. I removed the catheter Friday morning, and had a quick check up with the surgeon, Dr. Jae Kim, Friday afternoon, and everything seems good to go. All of this would have been 100 times more difficult without the ministrations of the angelic and long-suffering Cindy.

Other notable events - - Vivian is in town for a couple of weeks, and Cindy and I took Jasper and her out to the Chi Cafe for dinner Wednesday night. Cindy got a new phone (a Pixel 6a). I have read some interesting books, including Poison Ivy, a real indictment of our corrupt ‘meritocracy’, and Myth America, which I found very left-sided - - not to say the essays aren’t true, but if I can see why people would have the idea that universities are bastions of left liberal ‘wokeness’ after reading this. Two fiction books I would recommend are The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which won the Booker in 2022 - - a sero-comic fantasy about the Sri Lankan civil war, and Cursed Bunny, a Booker short-listed collection of horror short stories. Also good was Grady Hendrix’s Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.

The Hinsdale Public Library Spice club is continuing, and this month we got Chinese five spice. I made a ‘wet rub’ with onion, garlic, ginger, soy and oil, and baked chicken.