Thursday's Entertainments
My father seems to be haunting me these days and I don’t know why. It’s too early; snow has only just fallen. He has so many mysteries: What happened? When? Why? What would have been? What would he have thought about ____?
This poem popped up in my email today. I found myself crying before 10am. Weirdly, I’m not sure if these words make me ache more for him or more for Gmom.
From The Writer’s Almanac
Late Poem to My Father
Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
Directly to that boy in the fiery room,
As if it could reach him in time.
By Sharon Olds from The Gold Cell © Knopf.
----------*****----------
November 16th is the birthday of the novelist José Saramago, born in the small village northeast of Lisbon, Portugal (1922). He published his first novel Land of Sin (1947) when he was twenty-four, but after writing two more novels which he considered failures, he stopped writing fiction for the next thirty years. He said, "That was maybe one of the wisest decisions of my life... I had nothing worthwhile to say."
Saramago was in his mid-fifties, unemployed, and blacklisted by the government, when he decided he had no choice but to go back to writing fiction. He went to live in one of the poorest villages in his country and wrote a novel Raised from the Ground (1980) about three generations of a peasant family.
José Saramago said, "If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
----------*****----------
It was on November 15th in 1940 that 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription in American history.
There had been a long history of resistance to mandatory military service in this country. During World War I, an estimated 3 million young men refused to register, and 12 percent of those called up didn't report for duty or deserted.
Franklin Roosevelt's decision to impose a draft in the summer of 1940 was especially controversial because the country wasn't even at war. But Americans had all seen newspaper and newsreel coverage of the German Army rolling over Poland in a few weeks, and doing the same in France in a few months. By June of that year, Germans controlled most of the European continent, and the United States had a poorly trained standing army of only about 200,000 soldiers.
So even though he worried it might hurt his chances of reelection that November, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the first peacetime draft in American history. That October, 16 million young men appeared at precinct election boards across the country to register with the Selective Service. The first lottery was held in Washington, D.C., and it was designed to be as patriotic a ceremony as possible. Secretary of War Henry Stimson was blindfolded with cloth taken from a chair that had been used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the ladle he used to scoop out numbers had been made from the wood of one of the rafters of Independence Hall.
After the selection process, the first 75,000 draftees were called up to service on this day in 1940. During World War II alone, the draft selected 19 million men and inducted ten million. The draft lapsed briefly after World War II, but the Red Scare persuaded Truman to start it up again, and it continued until 1973.
Now here’s an interesting take on the draft:
Most Americans were happy about the end of the draft, but in 1999 the historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, "Today, Cajuns from the Gulf Coast have never met a black person from Chicago. Kids from the ghetto don't know a middle-class white. Mexican-Americans have no contact with Jews. Muslim Americans have few Christian acquaintances... But during World War II and the Cold War, American [men] from every group got together in the service, having a common goal-to defend their country... They learned together, pledged allegiance together, sweated together, hated their drill sergeants together, got drunk together, went overseas together. What they had in common-patriotism, a language, a past they could emphasize and venerate-mattered far more than what divided them."
This poem popped up in my email today. I found myself crying before 10am. Weirdly, I’m not sure if these words make me ache more for him or more for Gmom.
From The Writer’s Almanac
Late Poem to My Father
Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
Directly to that boy in the fiery room,
As if it could reach him in time.
By Sharon Olds from The Gold Cell © Knopf.
----------*****----------
November 16th is the birthday of the novelist José Saramago, born in the small village northeast of Lisbon, Portugal (1922). He published his first novel Land of Sin (1947) when he was twenty-four, but after writing two more novels which he considered failures, he stopped writing fiction for the next thirty years. He said, "That was maybe one of the wisest decisions of my life... I had nothing worthwhile to say."
Saramago was in his mid-fifties, unemployed, and blacklisted by the government, when he decided he had no choice but to go back to writing fiction. He went to live in one of the poorest villages in his country and wrote a novel Raised from the Ground (1980) about three generations of a peasant family.
José Saramago said, "If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
----------*****----------
It was on November 15th in 1940 that 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription in American history.
There had been a long history of resistance to mandatory military service in this country. During World War I, an estimated 3 million young men refused to register, and 12 percent of those called up didn't report for duty or deserted.
Franklin Roosevelt's decision to impose a draft in the summer of 1940 was especially controversial because the country wasn't even at war. But Americans had all seen newspaper and newsreel coverage of the German Army rolling over Poland in a few weeks, and doing the same in France in a few months. By June of that year, Germans controlled most of the European continent, and the United States had a poorly trained standing army of only about 200,000 soldiers.
So even though he worried it might hurt his chances of reelection that November, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the first peacetime draft in American history. That October, 16 million young men appeared at precinct election boards across the country to register with the Selective Service. The first lottery was held in Washington, D.C., and it was designed to be as patriotic a ceremony as possible. Secretary of War Henry Stimson was blindfolded with cloth taken from a chair that had been used at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the ladle he used to scoop out numbers had been made from the wood of one of the rafters of Independence Hall.
After the selection process, the first 75,000 draftees were called up to service on this day in 1940. During World War II alone, the draft selected 19 million men and inducted ten million. The draft lapsed briefly after World War II, but the Red Scare persuaded Truman to start it up again, and it continued until 1973.
Now here’s an interesting take on the draft:
Most Americans were happy about the end of the draft, but in 1999 the historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, "Today, Cajuns from the Gulf Coast have never met a black person from Chicago. Kids from the ghetto don't know a middle-class white. Mexican-Americans have no contact with Jews. Muslim Americans have few Christian acquaintances... But during World War II and the Cold War, American [men] from every group got together in the service, having a common goal-to defend their country... They learned together, pledged allegiance together, sweated together, hated their drill sergeants together, got drunk together, went overseas together. What they had in common-patriotism, a language, a past they could emphasize and venerate-mattered far more than what divided them."