This is not my first blog. I wrote one from about 2005-2010. For some reason, I stopped. Don’t remember why. When I wrote the old one (“Arthur Thinks”), I was still working. That meant a number of things. For one thing, it meant I could go into my firm’s work room and print out anything I wanted quickly, and so I did with all those blogs. I haven’t been printing out my 2022-  blog, but…..that’s for another time.

Yesterday, I pulled 2009, down from the shelf. That’s 15 years ago, so Art was 66. The one thing I notice is that, although I did write about Israel and Gaza several times even then, I wrote more about personal activities – where I went, who I saw and so forth. This is probably because I went to more places: I was out at least 5 days a week going to my office, I was 15 years younger, and three COVID had not given us all shell-shock. Or maybe, it was because, during those days, the world was in a better place. And we weren’t so concerned about domestic and foreign and planetary problems.

Today is Feb 1. I decided to see what I had done (or written about) in January 2009 (the numbers below correspond to the date):

1. We actually went out New Year’s Eve. We went to a special performance at Theater J of a group (which may have been a group only for that night) called the Serendipity 4, composed of Theodore Bikel (who was performing at Theater J at that time) on guitar and vocals, his wife Tamara Brooks at the piano, Shura Lipovsky doing vocals and Marima Kljuco, whom I referred to as “an extraordinary Bosnian accordianist”. Eastern European/Jewish folk music for the most part. Followed by a party.
2. A tree fell across the street, closing Davenport St all day; I mused about Israel and what can they do if Hamas does not want peace (Nothing new under the sun?)
3. I bought reading glasses in Turkey a few years before – the frame snapped.
4. Mini-reviews of two Christopher Isherwood books – Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains. (I re-read Mr. Norris last year).
5. There was another Gaza war raging (not as serious as today’s, but no one foresaw what his happening today). My words, though, could have been written in 2024: ”Where is the promise that Gaza will be rebuilt? That there will be compensation to the Gazans for their suffering? Why are food and medical supplies not being let in by either Israel or Egypt?…..”
6. A much longer post about Gaza. I should really copy it and put it in this 2024 blog. You will see how little has, in fact, changed. Maybe I will do this tomorrow.
7. More about Theodore Bikel, and how he can do his 90 minute, one man show, getting up and down, singing, playing multiple characters every day but Monday (but twice on Sunday) at Theater J at the age of 84. I end the blog by telling my readers to be sure not to tell Bikel how old he is.
8. I wrote something that I repeated last year in the current blog. A listing of deaths caused by other wars – 18 wars that each led to over 1 million deaths, including World War II, where 40,000,000 is a conservative number.
9. I wrote about Christopher Hitchens’ article in a recent Vanity Fair, talking about Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the resulting Iranian fatwa, the Japanese translator and the Italian translator both being stabbed to death in their respective countries, and the Norwegian publisher being shot three times in his apartment in Oslo.
10. I listed all of the things I did during the first 10 days of 2009 – seems extraordinary now. First, I went to two programs at Politics and Prose – author Steven Johnson talking about the scientific discoveries of Joseph Priestly, and diplomat Martin Indyk talking about his memoir of his activities during the Clinton years. Talking about the Middle East, Indyk said that “there is light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that we haven’t located the tunnel”. I ate very well at the Iron Gate Inn, and not so well at the DCJCC. I read both Manischewitz: the Matzo Family (Edie’s first cousin has been a Manischewitz for the past 50 years), and then Martin Gilbert’s book about Kristallnacht. I saw a whale exhibit at the National Geographic Society Museum (now closed for renovations), which didn’t impress me much. And – back when my office had tickets – we attended two Caps games that week.
11. I loved the Jan Lievens exhibit at the National Gallery and told those who missed it that they could catch the exhibit in Milwaukee. (I think it has left there by now.) And I bought a yearbook from Soldan High School in St. Louis (my father’s high school) for the year 1925 – my father graduated in 1920, but I thought, as a matter of loyalty (I think it is sitting on a shelf in a closet now. I don’t think much about it. I do think about a St. Louis University yearbook from, I think, 1923, which has a picture of my father as a graduating law student and my maternal grandfather, then on the medical school faculty. It is also somewhere on shelf.)
12. A long review of Diane Middlebrooks’ book, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath. I liked the book, and was fascinated by the story which I outlined on the blog.
13. It looks like I took the day off.
14. I had read a paper from Johns Hopkins University about looming water problems, and outlined what they said, concluding that – although many, many people are working on these problems – they may be beyond resolution.

It’s clear I can’t do the entire month in one post, so I will stop here. But you get the idea. It’s a great way to go back in time. Who says that you live only once?