The 28th Modern Olympic Games begins this week, having been delayed a year by the pandemic. For the athletes it has been a long wait, but the IOC and Tokyo’s decision to go forward could prove troublesome, given the limited vaccination rate to date in Japan and through much of the world.

I had the good fortune to have an inside view of the Barcelona and Atlanta Games, at least as to the Yachting (now Sailing) events. The athletes and volunteer officials that I knew appreciated their chance to be a part of the pinnacle of their sport and seemed to embody the “Faster, Higher, Stronger” motto of the Games. Many may have been the best in their country, but were far from the sport’s elite. Despite that difference, the best and the rest competed equally and respectfully from all I could see.

In the 25 years since the Atlanta Games, the IOC and related sports federations have suffered from the growing need for, and the corrupting effects of, the enormous amount of money it takes to put on more than 400 events in an ever-increasing number of sports. Many have suggested solutions which the New York Times reviewed today.

One thing television gets right with the Games is its focus on athletes and the competition. What isn’t shown is how much of Olympic attention and funding goes toward pleasing sports and other dignitaries as well as the media. Athletes’ facilities paled in comparison to theirs in my time, and I’m sure the same is sadly still true today.

The Atlanta Games were marred by the park bombing on July 27. The next morning my first task at the Savannah Yachting venue was to make sure every athlete’s and official’s boat was checked for any such risk. Like others at each venue, I did my job to assure the safety of the athletes who had dedicated so much of their lives to compete there.

Forty-five years ago today, a 14 year-old Nadia Comaneci scored the first perfect 10 in Women’s Gymnastics, to the thrill of all who watched. It as a magical moment. Certainly the Olympics needs to reform. Still, we can hope for more magic in the coming days.

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I wanted to note this morning that the steeple on London’s Cathedral of St. Paul’s burned on this day in 1561 after being struck by lightning. It was never rebuilt, which struck me (sorry) as a particularly appropriate decision. After all, if God preferred his house without a belfry, the truly devout would surely take his demonstrative hint.

But then I found an incongruous bit of history that intrigued me more. On June 4, 1411, King Charles VI granted a monopoly to the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon for the ripening of Roquefort cheese. The history of their cheese making by ripening in caves dates from time immemorial, so what King Charles thought he was bestowing seems presumptive in the extreme. I suppose his grant precluded others from claiming to make that unique flavor of sheep’s milk cheese, which interestingly is still limited under trademark law to this particular area, even though the demand long ago exceeded what could actually be processed in caves.

The Greeks deemed the art of cheesemaking to be a gift of Aristaeus, the god of shepherding, though it found its way into cultures throughout the world. At some point, I ran across a somewhat silly quote on the subject of cheese, which cultured in its own way into a little poem, which I thought I’d share:

Ode to Cheese

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese 

Gilbert K. Chesterton 

So much of what mankind has come to cherish 

we first found when things turned bad  

grapes into wine – malt beer – old bananas to bread 

and perhaps even the eternal fruitcake

But above all these we must praise the creation of cheese

the gift of Aristaeus whose alchemy turned soured curds

into aromatic edibles enjoyed wherever creatures yield milk

with each land’s method duly prized as best above all

Cheddar – Gruyere – Danish blue – Greece’s feta

Stilton – Camembert and even Stinking Bishop

the names roll on the tongue as easily as their tastes

all essences as diverse and divine as its tasters

All cheeses aged to essence to form the perfect

appetizer hors d’oeuvre lasagna or dessert

What would we make of chips without queso

Norway without fondue or macaroni without its Velveeta?

I suppose it is true that poets have been strangely silent

on the subject of cheese in all its creamy flavors

but that is because they have been too busy savoring it and in fact

I hear the faint cry of ham and rye calling for some Swiss even now

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Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on this day in 1431. The proximate cause of her sentence was refusal to wear women’s clothes, though the underlying reason was that she was deemed a threat to reigning political and religious authority. Most of what is known about her comes from the record of her interrogation for the crime of heresy, but this post is meant to be less about her and more about the human, or inhuman, nature of people who would kill for little to no reason, as with her. Joan of Arc’s accusers conspired against her, perhaps because they felt threatened by her popularity, resented her zeal or just because she was different – which certainly was true. For that they took her life.

Tomorrow marks one hundred years since the Tulsa riots that killed hundreds of African-Americans and burned their area of town known as Black Wall Street. Much has finally been said about this inexplicably evil mass murder of people with darker skin whose only crime was finding a way to succeed in a world dominated by others, but no one seems able to explain how people could sink to such baseness.

But then if we think ourselves now above such things, we need only look back to January 6th and the riot that sought to put aside an election and overturn the Constitution. Tulsa was purposefully forgotten for generations, as we now recognize. January 6 was shown on live television and filmed by countless phones, and yet a minority in Congress just this past week forestalled an official investigation into the insurrection out of fear that it would implicate its own members and weaken them politically.

I’ve tried to find something uplifting, or at least hopeful, to say about the confluence of these dates, but the best that comes to mind is that a few do remember and regret. Perhaps that candle in the darkness serves to mark and to recognize that we can be better.

And, of course, tomorrow is Memorial Day, a deserving day of remembrance.

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On this day in 1881, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. She lived a long and independent life and prevailed over hindrances and conventions that limited women of her era and that still do today. She first learned to care for the ailing early on when she tended to her brother for two years after a fall. She attended college, taught students, and formed a free public school. She was the first female U.S. Patent Office clerk, but left during the Civil War to nurse the wounded, risking her own life repeatedly. After the war she formed the Friends of the Missing Men, to search for MIA Union soldiers. She knew and was probably inspired by people like Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony to pursue even higher social goals.

In the 1870s during a lecture tour, she became involved with the beginnings of the International Red Cross, based in Switzerland, forming the American Red Cross, as noted, in 1881. Frederick Douglas signed its original incorporation papers. She served in its relief efforts, but seemed to fall short in managing its business and fund raising needs.

During her time, the American Red Cross provided relief after the Johnstown Flood, in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and after the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the year Congress granted a charter for the organization. She left its leadership in 1904, but its service continues today, thanks to one woman’s service and vision. Like all human institutions and perhaps Clara Barton as well, it occasionally falls short in our times, but its red cross symbol remains the first welcome sign of relief one sees after disaster strikes.

We are saturated today with words and opinions from all sides on issues of import and too many that are not. Clara Barton serves still today to remind us that actions do indeed speak louder than mere utterances.

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Three and a half years ago I posted a few comments on the anniversary of the day Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of All Saint’s Church in Wittenberg. Five hundred years ago today, Martin Luther stood to defend himself before the Diet of Worms (a regrettably memorable name) against charges of heresy stemming from that early form of Twitter post. He had asked for and received the prior day to consider the charges, prepare a defense and possibly to discuss options with mediators. History records that he answered the charges by saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” With that, if not three years earlier, the Reformation was born.

Most now acknowledge that the Catholic Church in those times was corrupt, even selling indulgences for sins in advance of their commission in order to finance construction projects in Rome to the detriment of local church funding needs, a practice not fully abandoned until the 20th Century. Luther, for his part, was stridently uncompromising in his reliance on an individual’s faith, which sparked one of Christianity’s largest schisms.

In reading Karen Armstrong’s, The Lost Art of Scripture, she remarks that many, if not most, religions begin with a focus on the poor and downtrodden. In time they tend to be coopted by and for a ruling class. She notes that Judaism began as a faith in the God of a tribal people, only to eventually embrace a priestly caste and even a king like neighboring empires.

One can argue that the Catholic Church of five hundred years ago had followed such a path, prompting Luther’s reformation-minded focus on the individual. Looking around today at wealthy churches that maintain only a nominal budget item for “charity,” leads me to wonder if we as a people have lost sight of something as well. It’s not my place to preach, but perhaps it is fair to ask.

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April is National Poetry Month, named – in an ironic twist – after a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “April is the Cruelest Month.” Personally, I’d think they might have chosen June, since it has shown up in every cloying English rhyme since Earth captured the moon, but more pressing issues abound, so April it is.

Poetry is a lot like golf. Anyone who watches (or reads) it done well wants to try it him – or her – self, and yes, that includes me. Pandemics seem to have proven good times for poets, good and poor. Shakespeare penned King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra while sitting out the plague. Lessers, like me, have published prolifically during this long COVID season, perhaps because quarantines deterred critics from hurling stones at their efforts.

Since it is April, I offer this poor homage to a poet due our honor, whose time has only begun to blossom.

Of Emily

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. 

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickenson

I’m no poet of course

but I found today

I’ve had more pieces 

published in my time 

than Emily in all of hers

But of course she died 

all too early after

once too often flirting 

with that one last end

she could not stop for

while the opus of my work

is but passing bits and bytes

less lasting than one

of the breathless dashes 

that punctuated her poems

which were all verses before

distilled to their essence

and hidden away in her

Pandoran chest until we

might dare sense her slant

I sometimes wonder

if there is another Emily

somewhere upstairs

in a lonely bedroom

penning music with words

and able at last to answer

Emily’s wistful wishes

but for now I know 

she was the perfect poet

and I am mere prose    

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Most students, if asked, will confess that they hate history. I get their point, but wonder if it’s history they hate or the mind numbing way it is often taught: dates to memorize, forgettable greats from too long ago and such. Chemistry and biology did the same thing for me: no mixing things together to see what happens or microscopes to discover frightening creatures with, just valences and phyla to memorize. At least that was my experience a century ago.

History for me though, when I dig around, can, as Marie Kondo says, “spark joy.” Today proved just such a day, because I learned that on this day in 1858, Hymen Lipman patented the invention of pencils with attached erasers. Yes, there was a time when such a thing was not at all obvious and, in fact, brand new. My great-grandparents must have marveled at the first one they held and at the genius of the idea. Even as long as we’ve enjoyed and appreciated pencils with erasers (there seems to be no one word to use for them), it took 150 years or so to come up with erasable pens, or at least to perfect them. Liquid Paper for typewriters came along sooner, only 100 years later, thanks to Bette Nesmith Graham, who to some is better known as the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees. The inventor of typewriters with correctable ribbons seems to have been lost in the scrapheap of time along with all the many manual and later electric typewriters that once populated office desks and punctuated the sound of business at work. Now we even have styluses with electronic erasers on the otherwise non-working end.

But for today I celebrate Hymen Lipman, whose name I misspelled in drafting this, but thanks to his genius, was able to correct.

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No, the phrase doesn’t quite fit, but the comparison is intriguing, because four hundred years ago today Samoset walked into the new Plymouth Colony and introduced himself in English to the weary and wary Pilgrims, asking for a beer just as one might today. He had encountered English fishermen earlier along the Maine coast and had learned some English, but to the settlers, a “savage” speaking their language must have been an incongruous shock.

After a time, Samoset brought with him Tisquantum, or “Squanto,” the last surviving member of the Patuxet tribe, which had been decimated by disease, possibly brought to the land by earlier Europeans. Squanto had been “saved” by being kidnapped and taken to Spain as a novelty of sorts, though he was wily enough to make his way back home. Squanto in turn introduced the Pilgrims to the leader of the local confederated tribes, Massasoit. Their forty year, sometimes rocky, alliance with Massasoit included the first Thanksgiving with his tribe and certainly helped the Pilgrims survive in a land they were poorly prepared for. As history and Nathaniel Philbrick recount, however, the natives were far from ultimately thanked for their hospitality.

American history is stained throughout its pages with the blood of its natives, killed by European diseases and driven down the Trail of Tears to reservations, which were themselves exploited by “the White Man.” Within that shameful context, it is finally fitting that yesterday the US Senate confirmed the first Native American, Deb Haaland, as Secretary of the Interior, which oversees US policy toward its native nations. Now after four hundred years, we find ourselves in the worthy hands of one of those who owned and belonged to this land long before we “discovered” it. It makes me wonder what she might lead us to do if tomorrow we encountered first contact with aliens from another land on another planet.

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This is the morning we wake groggily to each year, feeling as if we’d been on a bender and had lost an hour somewhere, but vaguely knowing wherever it went hadn’t been for fun. I thought I’d share a little prose poem to add a touch of what will serve as humor to mark the occasion.

Cassandra

On one Sunday each November, I am granted an extra hour to find all the clocks I lost an hour to in early March, so that I may set them straight.  And each year I uncover one rebellious clock behind a sofa or a watch hiding in the lint of a pocket that refused to give up its precious hour one cold March night.  All of which leaves me to ponder that it knew, all summer long an hour before me, where I left my glasses or that I would slip on the dog’s toy and break my arm, and that it had been mute to help.  But then I recall that persistent alarm from a clock I could never find, and I wonder.  And so each Fall, I put that clock back in its place, hoping I might just listen this time. 

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Over recent days and weeks, plenty of pundits have been marking the passage of one pandemic year, and there are at least 2,612,526 such tragic reasons to do so, if you rely on Johns Hopkin’s reported number of deaths worldwide, since COVID 19 emerged from a source and place we may never know. For me, today marks one year since we went out to dinner at a restaurant with friends. Even then, we were careful to distance from others and used hand sanitizer, relying on the advice of health experts that the virus was primarily spread by touch, though I was even then skeptical, and rightly so.

Since then I haven’t been closer than ten feet from pretty much anyone, and then only masked and in passing. We were fortunate enough to be able to quarantine at home, teaching by Zoom and venturing out occasionally to have groceries delivered to our car. Many now recognized as essential continued on with the necessities of life. Most where we live abided by mask and sanitizing sense, which could only be considered political statements in these existentially absurd times. We did so out of good sense and also because of conditions that put us at greater risk than most.

Fortunately, no one I’m close to has died, but I know many who have been ill. We have now been vaccinated, but have continued to stay safe thus far, since we are all only beginning to discern what that can safely mean for ourselves and, of course, others. We do plan to meet the same couple we last sat down with a year ago for outdoor dining soon, which though a tentative step, will be a happy one.

Tomorrow will mark a year from the day the WHO formally declared a pandemic. COVID 19 may never fully go away, but I hope for the time when we can all declare it under control and perhaps even over. There is much we all will need to do to tend to the too many wounds that have distanced us, not just physically, but in every way in this past year.

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