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Poem: "Sally Eats A Sundae Near the Bandstand in the Park" by Glyn Maxwell, from The Sugar Mile. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

SALLY EATS A SUNDAE NEAR THE BANDSTAND IN THE PARK

Mummy says it's pointless going. It comes
           It comes, she says, they'll have us where they please,
City, country, Hitler's got gas bombs
           I read about it, think about it: gas.

Our road had a big practice, with a bell
           That means the gas is coming, you can't see it
You can only smell it. If you've no sense of smell
           Or you're elderly it's likely you're too late,

You're standing there but dead. Anyway the gas bell
           Was just like our school bell, I told them that,
I told them they should change that. The gas rattle,
           That's like a football rattle, Harry said,

It sounds like in the stands at West Ham.
           I really need to use a certain place.
Look at the queue. I'm an imbecile I am.
           It melted with me yakking on like this.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the first man ever to print a book in English, William Caxton, (books by this author) born in Kent, England (1422). He was a wealthy merchant, living in Cologne, Germany. The printing press had been invented about 25 years earlier and Caxton had just translated a book about the history of Troy. He realized that printing was the thing for his book, and so he printed it in 1475, Historyes of Troye.

He went back to England and established the first printing press there. In 1478, he came out with an edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. For a long time, people in England called printed books Caxtons.

It's the birthday of Alfred Hitchcock, (movies by this director) born in London (1899), the "Master of Suspense," who made Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Psycho, and many other movies. He said, "I [want to] give [my audience] pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."

It's the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain, 1940, when Germany began to bomb England during World War II. France had been overrun. Germany's plan was to destroy the Royal Air Force before invading Great Britain.

The British had an advanced radar system, which helped them, but by the middle of August, they lost a quarter of their aircraft. Shortly thereafter, everything changed. On August 24, 1940, a German bomber accidentally bombed London. Britain responded by bombing Berlin. Hitler was so angry, he ordered his air force to bomb London exclusively, turning his attention away from the Royal Air Force.

On the first night, 600 German bombers came in waves, dropping explosive and incendiary devices over East London where the factories and the docks were. The bombing of London continued over the next eight months. It was so unrelenting that it became almost a part of ordinary life.

An American journalist named Mary Welsh was living in London, and she wrote in her diary, "Today has brought the usual post-bomb misery, the taste of powder in the mouth, burglar alarms ringing incessantly, glass crunching under our shoes in the flat and also outside, clothes in closets and drawers heavy with dust, my eyes red and face old looking and feeling as though it was burning, and a terrible job to concentrate my thinking."

But the British people were remarkably resilient and went about life as normally as they could. By the end, more than 30,000 Londoners had been killed, more than 100,000 houses destroyed and a third of the city burned to the ground. But historians now feel that if Hitler had focused on destroying the Royal Air Force instead of bombing London, he probably would have won the battle.

Poem: "The Worriers' Guild" by Philip F. Deaver, from How Men Pray ©. Anhinga Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Worriers' Guild

Today there is a meeting of the
Worriers' Guild,
and I'll be there.
The problems of Earth are
        to be discussed
        at length
        end to end
        for five days
        end to end
        with 1100 countries represented
        all with an equal voice
        some wearing turbans and smocks
        and all the men will speak
        and the women
        with or without notes
        in 38 languages
        and nine different species of logic.
Outside in the autumn
        the squirrels will be
        chattering and scampering
        directionless throughout the town
        because
they aren't organized yet.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is the anniversary of the day on which President Harry Truman announced that the Second World War had come to an end. You might argue that more human beings were happy on this day in 1945 than on any other day in history.

It was the worst war in history. An estimated 60 million people died; about two-thirds of them were civilians. In the United States, the war had been going on for three years and eight months. About one in every eight Americans served in the war—more than 16 million American soldiers. Virtually every American family had at least one member overseas. With 400,000 Americans killed, most families knew somebody who had died in the war, and the most American casualties had come in the last year of the war.

Most Americans had believed that the war was far from over. The first few battles on Japanese islands had been some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Military analysts were projecting horrific losses, casualty estimates in the hundreds of thousands. But after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese suddenly accepted terms of complete surrender. And the announcement was made on this day at about 7:00 p.m. The newswires carried the headline, "Japan Surrenders."

There were spontaneous celebrations and parades in every major city in America. In New York City, more than a million people filled the streets, overflowing Times Square, the crowd stretching from 40th all the way up to 52nd street. Factories blew their whistles. Air raid sirens went off. Ships and trains and cars honked their horns. Churches tolled their bells.

Americans had been living under strict food and gas rationing, and once the news arrived, people went to the gas stations, filled up their cars and went riding around for the fun of it. Throughout the war, people had tried to keep their lights off after dark to save energy, but on this night, people turned on their lights and left them on all night. Some children who'd grown up during the war saw the streets lit up with lights for the first time.

And one thing that commentators noticed at the time was that nobody shouted, "We've won the war!" or anything about triumph. They simply shouted, "The war is over!"

The most famous photograph of that day in 1945 showed a sailor in Times Square kissing a nurse in a white uniform. The nurse's name was Edith Shain. She later said, "When I was kissed, I closed my eyes. I didn't look at him. It was a startling thing. But I thought, this man had fought the war for all of us." The photograph of the sailor and the nurse was the cover of LIFE magazine that next week and that photo has been reprinted thousands of times.

Poem: "The Book of A" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark. © David R Godine. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Book of A

Raised during the Depression, my stepfather
responded to the economic opportunity
of the 1950s by buying more
and more cheap, secondhand things
meant to transform his life.
I got this for a hundred bucks,
he said, patting the tractor that listed
to one side, or the dump truck that started
with a roar and wouldn't dump.
Spreading their parts out on his tarp.
he'd make the strange whistle
he said he learned from the birds
for a whole morning
before the silence set in.
Who knows where he picked up
the complete A–Z encyclopedias
embossed in gold and published
in 1921? They were going to take these
to the dump, he said. Night after night
he sat up, determined to understand
everything under the sun
worth knowing, and falling asleep
over the book of A. Meanwhile, as the weeks,
then the months passed, the moon
went on rising over the junk machines
in the tall grass of the only
world my stepfather ever knew,
and nobody wrote to classify
his odd, beautiful whistle, formed
somehow, in the back of his throat
when a new thing seemed just about to happen
and no words he could say expressed his hope.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of contemporary poet Mary Jo Salter, (books by this author) born in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1954). She's the author of several collections of poetry, including Sunday Skaters (1994), A Kiss in Space (1999), and Open Shutters (2003).

It's the birthday of food writer Julia Child, (books by this author) born Julia McWilliams in Pasadena, California (1912). She was a tomboy growing up and never cooked anything. She grew to be more than six feet tall, and when she went to college she wanted to be a basketball star. She eventually changed her mind and tried to write a novel, but that didn't work out either.

During World War II, she got a job with the Office of Strategic Service and hoped to become a spy, but instead she worked as a file clerk. She got to know her future husband Paul Child in China, and they both became obsessed with Chinese cuisine. When they got back to the United States, they got married, and she started taking cooking lessons. She later said, "I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate."

Though Harry Truman had announced the Japanese surrender the day before, it was on this day in 1945 that the Allies officially declared V-J Day, beginning one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in American history.

American factories had become more and more efficient throughout the war, and once it was over, they were able to focus on consumer goods. In the year after World War II ended, Detroit produced 2.1 million cars, a 2,500 percent increase from the year before. Factories also began to produce all the appliances that had been invented but that no one had been able to afford before the war: washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, and televisions.

Hundreds of thousands of happy couples had romantic reunions after the end of World War II, and nine months after V-J day, in May 1946, 233,452 babies were born in the United States. It was the largest number of babies that had ever been born in a single month in American history. By the end of 1946, 3.4 million babies had been born, the largest generation of Americans ever born at that point.

More than anything else, these new American families wanted houses. The country became so crowded that more than a half million families were living in Quonset huts. Many newly married couples had to move in with their families. The government provided a mortgage program for returning GIs, and developers began to build houses by the tens of thousands.

The most famous housing developments were those built by the Levitts of Long Island, New York, who constructed more than 140,000 houses. The average house in Levittown cost about $8,000, with a mortgage payment of $65 a month. When people first moved into the new neighborhoods, there were no streets or streetlights, and the lawns had yet to grow grass. But every new house included a stove, a refrigerator, and a washing machine.

The period of economic growth that followed World War II would last for 30 years, and the prosperity was more widespread in the post-war years than during any other economic boom since. For many Americans it was the greatest period in our country's history. Whenever politicians talk about the way things used to be, they're almost always referring to the period after World War II.

Poem: "A Country Story" by Kenneth Fields, from Classic Rough News. © The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

A Country Story

"When I was a little girl back in East Texas,"
My mother's mother, Beulah, used to tell,
"There was an outbreak of the German measles,
Mama was pregnant, so I went away
To a neighbor lady's, three or four miles from home
When the first signs showed. I was just eight, and sick,
And lonesome for Mama. One day she came for me.
My little sister had broken out, and Mama
Figuring she would die, and the baby, too,
Wanted us all together for those last weeks.
She wanted me home with her. As it turned out
My sister had been reading by the fire
And broke out from the heat, and it was me
That carried the measles home. After Mama died
I used to think of seeing her out the window
Talking to the neighbor lady on that day,
Crying and wiping her eyes with her apron hem."

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1977, Elvis Presley died at 42 in Memphis, Tennessee. He began his singing career by performing hymns and gospel tunes with his parents, Vernon and Gladys, at concerts and state fairs. His parents bought him his first guitar when he was 11. He was 18 when he walked into a Memphis studio and paid $4 to record "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" as a present for his mother.

It's the birthday of the man who created the True Story and True Romance magazines, Bernarr Macfadden, born in Mill Spring, Missouri (1868). His parents both died when he was a boy, his father of alcoholism and his mother of consumption. His uncle sold him off as an indentured servant to work on a farm. After he almost died of malnutrition, he became obsessed with his health. He started doing daily exercises and became a vegetarian. When he was 18, he ran away from the farm and eventually set up his own business in New York City, teaching people to exercise and eat right.

He invented a muscle-building machine and wrote a pamphlet to advertise it. The pamphlet grew into his first magazine, Physical Culture, which came out in March 1899. His first editorial was titled, "Weakness Is a Crime, Don't Be a Criminal." His magazine was such a success that he became one of the first health and fitness gurus.

Readers of Physical Culture often wrote letters to the magazine asking for advice on their love lives or describing unhealthy experiences they regretted. McFadden got the idea to publish these letters in a separate magazine called True Story. It was the first true confessions magazine, published in 1919. When other popular women's magazines were publishing articles about the love lives of duchesses and princesses, True Story published articles about the love lives of secretaries and shop girls. It was one of the most popular magazines of its time.

It's the birthday of author and editor William Maxwell, (books by this author) born in Lincoln, Illinois (1908). He grew up in that small town. His father was a fire insurance salesman, and was on the road for days at a time. With his father gone so much, Maxwell became especially close to his mother. He said, "She just shone on me like the sun." When he was 10 years old, his mother caught influenza and died during the epidemic in 1918. He wrote, "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away." His family moved to Chicago a few years later. Though he never lived in Lincoln, Illinois, again, he never forgot it and he wrote many of his short stories about his childhood there with his mother.

After college he moved to New York and got a job at the New Yorker. He started in the art department, where he persuaded John Updike to give up drawing cartoons and start writing fiction. Maxwell worked at the New Yorker for 40 years, editing fiction by John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and Vladimir Nabokov. He said that what made him a good editor was that he himself hated being edited, and so he changed very little. Eudora Welty said, "For fiction writers, he was the headquarters."

While editing the stories of others at The New Yorker, Maxwell was writing his own fiction. He wrote many novels, including They Came Like Swallows (1937) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980).

Most of his short stories are collected in All the Days and Nights (1995). Almost all of his novels and stories were inspired in one way or another by the memory of his mother's death. He was asked later in his life what he what say to his mother if he could tell her anything. He said, "I would tell her, 'Here are these beautiful books that I made for you.'"

Poem: "No Work Poem #1" by Virgil Suarez, from 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

No Work Poem #1

what hurt my father most after his accident
where one bad turn to the water fountain
nearly cost him his life, a forklift dropped
a pallet of 526 pounds of compressed card—
board on him and crushed him like a bug,
was how the company told all of his work friends
that because my father had gotten a lawyer
they couldn't talk to my father anymore,
that it was policy that no one come in close
contact with him as though he had malaria
or some other contagious disease. My father
was depressed by this, a man who shared hard
work with other men, and they were his friends,
and his true friends came by anyway to share
stories of what went on at work, and this helped
rehabilitate my father, slowly, and I saw it
in his eyes when his best friend, Manzano,
told my father how many fewer boxes of coffee
they packed without him, that my father,
el campeon, still held the record—I didn't
understand this kind of work-talk,
but I saw how my father when he thought
he was alone would raise his hands and look
at them in the light, as though they were gifts,
and they were; with his hands he worked,
hard, with his hands, he beat the clock,
with his hands he provided for his family,
and proud, he looked at them, the way his
thin fingers now moved; with his hands
he clawed at life, what is given, what is taken.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist Jonathan Franzen, (books by this author) born in Western Springs, Illinois (1959). He spent years working on his third novel. After five years he had written hundreds of pages, but he still didn't know what the book was about. He drew a giant diagram, graphing out the events, themes, and characters. He finally decided to throw everything away except for one chapter and started over. He wrote the rest of the book in less than a year. The Corrections evenetually was published in 2001. It's about a mother who wants all of her adult children to come to her house for one last Christmas before their father dies. It was a huge success.

It was on this day in 1998 that President Bill Clinton became the first sitting president in American history forced to testify in a criminal case investigation of which he was the focus.

Other presidents before Clinton had testified before grand juries in the past, but they had always done so to give evidence against others. Thomas Jefferson testified against former Vice President Aaron Burr. Gerald Ford testified in a trial of a man who had tried to assassinate him. Jimmy Carter testified in the bribery trial of a financier named Robert Vesco. But Clinton was the first sitting president ever to be served a subpoena to testify in his own indictment.

Clinton's lawyers and legal advisors encouraged him not to testify, but Clinton decided to do it anyway. The questioning took place on this day in 1998 in the Map Room of the White House. Clinton answered questions for four hours. The proceedings were videotaped and broadcast via closed circuit television to the grand jury in the federal court house.

The videotape of the testimony was released to the media. When the testimony was broadcast, 20 million Americans saw Bill Clinton in a medium close-up. For four hours, the camera never zoomed in or pulled back or cut to a different angle. The questions came from disembodied off-camera voices. Bill Clinton occasionally used reading glasses to read prepared statements, and he sipped a Diet Coke throughout the proceedings. But instead of looking angry and evasive, most Americans were struck by just how humiliated he seemed.

Most Americans saw a man forced to answer embarrassing and intrusive questions about his private life. As the questions progressed, Clinton looked more and more uncomfortable. It was perhaps the most human image of a president Americans had ever seen. Instead of turning against him for evading those questions, most Americans sympathized with him for having to answer those questions. His approval ratings remained above 70 percent after the airing of his testimony, and they even went higher in the following months.

Poem: "Hailstorm, 1965" by Twyla Hansen, from Potato Soup. © The Backwaters Press. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Hailstorm, 1965

     Q: What is the largest hailstone in the US?
     A: There have been six reports of hailstones eight inches in diameter.
         -The Weather Channel

It was the summer I turned sixteen, one brother
was soon to be married and we'd sold the farm.
I remember wanting desperately to be kissed.

Everything wavered on some kind of edge, elm trees
a graceful dome over the dusty streets. Nothing to warn,
only cumulonimbus clouds in the afternoon, intense up—

drafts, sky hazed sulfur-green, hail starting as crystalline
seeds that grew to marble-size, geometrically then,
to the size of softballs, clattering heavy against metal,

wood, glass, against the only small world we knew.
All the west windows in the high school, every roof,
field corn stripped down to stubs, lives shattered

that day by crop failure, gouges, even holes in the ground.
There had never been any guarantee. Always there is
a risk, a gamble, hard choices to make. My oldest brother

and I scooped out stones that ripped through
the ragtop of his '62 Impala. I can't imagine hail the size
of a melon. Somehow that day I sensed that youth

had dissipated, that through the vapor of downed leaves
and broken branches, there would always be another crisis,
and another close call, and yet there was something more out there

circling, the open road where I drove west—my oldest brother dozing
in the passenger's seat, my learners permit in tow—eighty on I-90
toward Missoula, toward the end of what we know now as innocence.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Paula Danziger, (books by this author) born in Washington, D.C. (1944). Her father often yelled at her as she was growing up in New York, and she told herself that someday she'd use it in a book. In 1974, she did, in a book for young adults called The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. She followed it up with many more, including Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? (1979).

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, (books by this author) born in Norfolk, England (1925). He's the author of many science fiction novels and collections of short stories, including Supertoys Last All Summer Long (2001), which was the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie A.I.

It's the birthday of explorer Meriwether Lewis, born just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, (1774). He was the man that Thomas Jefferson chose to explore the new Louisiana Territory in 1804, and he in turn asked William Clark to be his partner on the journey.

Lewis was the younger man of the two, and whereas Clark was easy-going and friendly, Lewis was quiet and intellectual. Lewis kept meticulous journals and recorded everything they saw: prairie dogs, grizzly bears, Native American tribes both friendly and hostile. When the account of the expedition was collected and published, most of the words were Lewis's.

Among the many written observations of geography, Indian customs, and flora and fauna, Lewis also sent back specimens to Thomas Jefferson of the most interesting things he'd found. Among the varied items were several living animals: four magpies, one sharp-tailed grouse, and one black-tailed prairie dog. The prairie dog and one of the magpies arrived in good health, and they spent the rest of their days in the nation's capital.

Poem: "Girder" by Nan Cohen, from Rope Bridge. © Cherry Grove Collection. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Girder

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward.

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Ogden Nash, (books by this author) born in Rye, New York (1902). He wrote "To keep your marriage brimming, / With love in the loving cup, / Whenever you're wrong, admit it; / Whenever you're right, shut up."

It's the birthday of fashion designer (Gabrielle) Coco Chanel, born in Saumur, France (1883). Along with the perfume Chanel No. 5, which came out in 1922, she introduced turtleneck sweaters, trench coats, costume jewelry, bell-bottom trousers, bobbed hair, and the "little black dress."

Chanel said, "I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like."

It's the birthday of the memoirist Frank McCourt, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1930). He was the first of seven children born to two Irish immigrants. He lived for a few years in New York City, as his father struggled to hold onto a job, but after his younger sister died, the family decided to return to Ireland. They settled in a tiny Irish town called Limerick.

McCourt's father was an alcoholic, who got fired from his jobs again and again, and managed to spend all of his meager income at the pub. McCourt grew up wearing tattered clothing and shoes that had been resoled with scraps of old tires. His family's home had neither a bathroom nor electricity. He and his siblings slept every night in bed with their parents on a flea-infested mattress. For most meals, all they had was tea and bread. McCourt's mother said that tea and bread was a balanced meal, because it contained a liquid and a solid.

Two of McCourt's brothers died of disease and malnutrition. McCourt was 10 years old when he caught typhoid fever. He had to spend a week in the hospital, and he was shocked to find that the hospital was a kind of paradise. It was the first time he could remember that he got three square meals a day, the first time he had slept between real bed sheets, and it was also the first time that he had free access to books. He read Shakespeare in the hospital, and fell in love with literature. From that day forward, he would borrow books wherever he could find them, and since his house had no electricity, he would read at night on the street, standing under a streetlamp.

McCourt eventually saved enough money to buy a ticket on a boat to New York City. He served in the Korean War and went to college on the GI Bill. He became a high school English teacher and taught in the New York City public schools for 18 years.

For years he tried to write about his experiences growing up in Ireland, but he found he was too angry to write anything worth reading. Then, one day, he was listening to the way his granddaughter used language, and he suddenly realized that the key to writing his book would be to write it in the voice of a child. A few days later, McCourt opened up a notebook and wrote the words, "I'm in a playground on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy. He's two, I'm three. We're on the seesaw." It was his earliest memory, and it became one of the first scenes in what would become his memoir, Angela's Ashes.

The book came out in 1996. The publisher printed a modest run of 27,000 copies, and McCourt himself said he was just pleased to have published a book at all. But the book caught on through word of mouth, and McCourt's public readings were immensely popular. And then the book won the Pulitzer Prize. It eventually spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list, becoming one of the most popular memoirs ever written.