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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Every day has its history to recount, sometimes unforgettable, other times mundane, but today marks several unrelated events worth noting. On this day in 1991, Rodney King was beaten my Los Angeles police, something that had happened to others like him many times before by all accounts, though this was perhaps the first captured on camera and shared around the world. When the officers were acquitted a year later and riots erupted in LA and beyond, King, whose life was admittedly an otherwise checkered one, had the decency to say, “I just want to say – you know – can we all get along? Can we, can we get along?” It is tempting to editorialize, but a simple reminder of his words can still inspire.

On this day in 1951, “Rocket 88” was recorded at Sam Phillips Sun Records studio in Memphis by the later infamous Ike Turner and his band. Phillips later touted the song as the first Rock and Roll recording. The upbeat R&B tune was one of the first to have significant crossover appeal with white audiences, opening the ears of many to the rich and creative history of black music, which lily white artists like Pat Boone and others coopted in time.

I’m not schooled enough, in music or sociology, to comment meaningfully on these subjects, but I do find one bit of trivia about the song notable. The fuzz effect so prominent in the recording was the result of using wads of paper to shore up an amplifier cone that had broken in transit. Rock continued to experiment in ways to distort and alter electric sounds for many years in the work of many artists like Jimmi Hendrix. Today’s popular music, if you consider it Rock at all, carries on the tradition with the use of autotune effects to alter the sound of singers, many of whom have perfectly fine natural voices. But then, age alone does not qualify one as a critic.

And then today marks the 1931 official adoption by Congress of “The Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem. What is notable to me is that the poem on which it is based was written by the amateur poet, Francis Scott Key, in 1814, on the back of an envelope. This fact set me to thinking about other famous uses for repurposed envelopes. Some accounts have Abraham Lincoln writing his Gettysburg Address on an envelope while on the train to the memorial. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote “Absence” to her husband on an envelope, following his death:

“Ah! he is gone—and I alone;
How dark and dreary seems the time!
‘Tis Thus, when the glad sun is flown,
Night rushes o’er the Indian clime.”

Emily Temple chronicled a set of examples for “The Atlantic“, which shows examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. And then there were Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, about whom an entire book has been written, “The Gorgeous Nothings“, reviewed in the New York Times.

NPR and others reported just yesterday that 300 year old letters folded so intricately that opening would destroy them can now be deciphered through scanning devices. No one, however, will ever write anything at all, memorable or not, on the back of a blog post, email, or tweet. Indeed, despite the best efforts of Dunder Mifflin, paper itself seems no longer ever within reach for those inspired moments when a timeless thought comes to mind. Something to consider perhaps in a quiet lull when tempted to check your mobile phone.

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There are two million three hundred thousand tragic ways, and ever more daily, to mark the course of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that has plagued the world with COVID 19 over the past years and change. We may never quite trace its exact origin or its direct path around the globe and into a pandemic we thought could never happen again.

Still there are markers along the way worth noting. Cases of a then unidentified disease were first noticed in Wuhan China as early as perhaps November 2019. By the end of December China had isolated the virus, deciphered its genetic code and shared at least that data.

I began following news the disease around then and noted that CIVID 19, as the disease caused by the virus was named, had spread in the Wuhan region and was soon detected in Italy, so I watched and waited for the first cases in the US, expecting they might be found in Atlanta, where I live, because of our busy international airport.

As it happened, the first case in this country was found in Seattle on January 20, in a man who had returned from visiting family in Wuhan. He was hospitalized and recovered, but by then the disease had infected others in the area and elsewhere, perhaps due to him or likely from independent sources connected in some way to its origin. We may never know because, in part, our medical infrastructure and government were not prepared. To this day, contact tracing is mostly handled by word of mouth by those who tested positive being willing to step forward and reach out themselves to those they may have infected.

It turns out that the real world is complex and unpredictable, and we don’t have Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo to save us all in less than two hours, just before the closing credits. It may be more like something from Stephen King, in which the last scene shows whatever creature thought to be defeated is seen walking into the darkness with ominous music in the background.

Today does mark one year since the first known death in the US by COVID 19. CNN reports that Patricia Dowd (pictured above) died on February 6, 2020 in San Jose, California of what was later identified as COVID 19. They didn’t know for some time, because testing then, as to a lesser extent now, was hard to come by.

By the end of February, the first horrific outbreak in a Seattle nursing home had become known, and by then I had ordered hand sanitizer, masks, gloves and other supplies, expecting the worst. Despite the willfully blind denials of too many and failures at nearly every level of government, what we have seen has been just about as dreadful as one could have imagined.

Those of us who have survived have done so by luck, some common sense, dedicated medical professionals and the kindness of others. Nearly 27 million in this country, however, have been known to be infected (said to be probably three times that number infected but untested) and 450,000 have died (probably many more if you add collateral deaths that wouldn’t have occurred in the absence of the disease).

In mentioning medical professionals, we should call out our real life Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Fauci, who stood tall and true through death threats and talk of drinking bleach, though he did say he’d rather be played by Brad Pitt (and was).

The next weeks and months promise hope, through vaccines just now beginning to be distributed, but thousands still die here daily. What’s more, the virus has begun to shape shift in ways that may challenge the vaccines.

The story of Pandora, the Greeks’ Eve, echoes in the events of this past year. After Prometheus gave man divine fire, Zeus chose to punish man by commanding Hephaestus to create woman, which I suppose does show that both history and myth were written by men. Each Olympian was commanded to give a gift to Pandora, whose name means “all gifted.”

Hermes, the precocious child-god and a favorite of Zeus, gave Pandora a “pithos,” actually a jar but later mistranslated by Erasmus into what we know as a box. As we all know, Pandora’s curiosity led her to open the box, releasing all the evils of the world. One thing remained in her box, “elepis.” This word is often translated as hope, or more aptly the spirit of hope, but scholars have long questioned this simple interpretation. Perhaps it was a reflection of what one may see in it, whether hope or despair in knowing we are all too human to do more than merely hope.

Pandora buried her box with elepis still within, and the Greeks never quite explain who released it, if at all. I do know we need it ever so today.

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Mike Luckovich of the AJC has captured lightning in an image so many times you have to wonder if he is a direct descendant of Ben Franklin. He hit his mark again this morning to note the passing of Henry (Hank) Aaron at 86.

I was born in Atlanta and grew up with the Atlanta Braves as my home team. My dad took me to games from time to time, and I took my now kids as well, though they were both of the age that peanuts drew their attention more than the game.

I was a fan when Ted Turner embossed his team with his indelible eccentricity while also turning them into America’s baseball team through his Super Station TBS. They were often hapless but always entertaining and no matter what were anchored by one stalwart great: Hank Aaron, who quietly played the game with strength, grace, consistency and power.

If you follow baseball at all, you know the story of the mountain he climbed athletically and as a black ballplayer in the South as he methodically chased Babe Ruth’s career home run record, one of the most cherished among baseball faithful. I followed the 1973 and then 1974 seasons closely as the record came within reach.

Atlanta fans, locally and across the nation cheered him on, but “The Hammer,” as he was called, quietly endured threats and hate mail spewed toward as good as an example of a man as Ruth was sad. The mail, good and bad, totaled 900,000 in 1973, so much that his contract had to call for a secretary to manage the tide and to report threats to the FBI.

The story and that of Aaron’s life are told in his book, “If I Had a Hammer“. Wikipedia’s article on Aaron gives a short version of his life story and his records, which include:

755 home runs, a number purists rightly consider to be the career record for players not tainted by PEDs

6,856 total bases, by far the most for any player

3000+ hits, even without his homers, highest among his peers

Aaron pounded home runs of 30 to 45 year after year for most of his 23 years as a player

He drew walks more often than he struck out, a rarity for power hitters.

All these things were true, but none captures or reflects his quiet strength as a civil rights figure, something he lived, but could finally voice freely when he put down his bat. In 1997, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times, reflecting his views through the lens of baseball. With his death, many of his behind the scenes deeds will now likely never be told. We know though that he kept all that hate mail, which must have itself been enough to count as a record if anyone kept count of such odious things. They were a reminder to him of all he rose above.

The past year and change has been as hard on baseball as it has been for us all. More than the time’s share of greats have died, but some long overdue change has come, if only in taking down racist team names. The Atlanta Braves still retain their moniker, a change they should know to make. Let me be the first to suggest the “Atlanta Hammers.”

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It was four years ago today that I first posted on this blog with these lines:

Often, I think, too many words are spoken and too little said of any lasting meaning or value.  As a result, when the shouting is over, not all that should be considered has been said.  That is my premise for this blog.

Mine is not meant to be “the last word”, but if it prompts more thoughtful reflection I will deem the effort a success.

I read recently that if something won’t matter in five years, it may not deserve five minutes of worry now.  I suspect there is an element of truth there, at least in the sense that we should think more deeply and with a more lasting perspective than Twitter often prompts.  This blog, like my interests, will touch on a range of topics and I hope some will interest you.  Much that relates to politics falls into the short-term concern category, and I plan to leave most of those discussions to others.

More of the truth was that I despaired of inflamed political rhetoric and the frightening results of the 2016 election. I wasn’t sure what one inconsequential person could do, but I felt the still, small voice of what was once deemed kind and thoughtful reason might offer perspective in the whirlwind that had finally overcome civility in politics.

I’ve posted about 100 times since then, often about moments in history and what they might say to the thoughtful today. As best as I can tell, few if any have found an appetite for these posts from a virtual voice crying in the wilderness, certainly not to those who seek wealth or vengeance through coopted Christianity or for the utter defeat of any who doubt the dogma of their political religions.

And yet I have persisted, not to be heard, so much as to speak and settle my mind with the thought that there is hope, that humanity can rise above hate and that someone should keep that fragile flame alive until enough realize we need it again.

When I began the vigil that is this blog, I feared the horsemen that might be released by those unprepared for the responsibilities of leadership and that they might use their power for personal gain, vengeance or to tear down institutions to promote their form of anarchy. My belief that our country was better than that was rarely validated.

The events of those four years proved vastly more destructive than I imagined in my deepest fears. The list is long, and cannot do justice to the whole of its horribles that include: families separated, children caged, open and even proud white suprematist acts, killings of blacks by those sworn to protect us all, disenfranchisement of voters, efforts to turn courts into political tools, and finally the inhumanity of fiddling on Twitter while hundreds of thousands died of a pandemic. The list is as long as it is disgusting.

It ended with an assault on the most fundamental of our institutions, the election of a President, an assault that culminated in the sitting President inciting a mob to disrupt Congress and deface the most sacred place in our secular democracy, the Capital itself. In another context and in trying to grasp the events of January 6, I wrote a few lines, which are stronger than I would like to feel.

And so I offer, in what kindness I can summon,

these few parting words of counsel:

Treason is unpardonable.

This is our country now,

and you would do well to leave 

while you have the freedom to go.

And take with you all the false flags 

you waved in our temple of democracy.

Only leave the one you desecrated

because we take back, and

will fly it anew from on high,

knowing it and this land 

belong again to we who 

will soon again laugh with joy,

hope and the promise that 

truth will truly set us free.

Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon on this day in year 49, the decisive step in declaring his rule of Rome. I at least, pray we have sent the self-declared, but mad, monarch of our times packing as a lesson to those who would have torn down all we have worked and that so many have died for. Too much wrong has occurred, the consequences of which will far outlast the five year time I mentioned four years ago.

I hope now to go quietly back to my votive vigil and tend the candle of hope until the last words of vitriol have been exhausted, and we can begin again to make our world a better place for all.

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The New York Times had a thoughtful reflection this morning on John Conway’s Game of Life, created in 1970. Neither a game nor about life as we know it, the computer program visually simulated a world made of a cellular grid with a beginning state and a set of rules for cells that live, reproduce by connecting with others and die. It predated Pong and, while among the simplest of imagined worlds, continues to fascinate fans today, as demonstrated by its own Wiki site: conwaylife.com.

Conway long rued his creation for its popularity, which detracted from his more serious work, though he eventually got wry pleasure for being described as “The inventor of Life.” I couldn’t do Conway’s creation justice here, but it is worth noting that the Game of Life has been used to illustrate the “butterfly effect” and the randomness of – well – life itself.

With that in mind, I found elsewhere that it was 45 years ago tonight that Dan Fogelberg experienced the random meeting that became his bittersweet ballad, Same Old Lang Syne. Jill Greulich and Fogelberg dated in high school in Peoria, Illinois and parted ways, as the song related. Both had returned home for the holidays and ran into each other in a convenience store. She first heard the song some years later on the radio, after she had divorced the husband mentioned, who was not, by the way, an architect.

I suppose we may wish for moments like theirs to reflect on times we recall wistfully. Despite the randomness of life, it has a way at times of winking at you with Fogelberg moments if you are watching. I have had one or two of my own that may be worthy of sharing someday after time has helped process them. What I’ve found though is how much richer life is if you live each day as if it were just such a moment worth preserving, because life is more than a game.

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