I'd Rather be the Father
by Faith Shearin

Right from the start, it's easier to be the father: no morning
nausea, no stretch marks. You can wait outside the

delivery room and keep your clothes on. Notice how
closely the word mother resembles smother, notice

how she is either too strict or too lenient: wrong for giving up
everything or not enough. Psychology books blame her

for whatever is the matter with all of us while the father
slips into the next room for a beer. I wanted to be

the rational one, the one who told a joke at dinner.
If I were her father we would throw a ball across

the lawn while the grill fills with smoke. But who
wants to be the mother? Who wants to tell her what

to wear and deliver her to the beauty shop and explain
bras and tampons? Who wants to show her what

a woman still is? I am supposed to teach her how to
wash the dishes and do the laundry only I don't want

her to grow up and be like me. I'd rather be the father
who tells her she is loved; I'd rather take her fishing

and teach her to skip stones across the lake of history;
I'd rather show her how far she can spit.


Faith Shearin, "I'd Rather Be the Father" from Moving the Piano. © 2011 Stephen F. Austin University Press. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of Henry James (books by this author), author of 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays, and several books of travel and criticism, born in New York City (1843). His father was a friend of Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, and the family traveled throughout Europe. When James was in his 20s and writing short stories he moved to Europe because he could live cheaply there and felt at home as an outsider. Then he fell in love with England. He wrote, "The capital of the human race happens to be British." James wrote the majority of his famous novels — like The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902) — and his famous stories — like "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) — either in London or an old house in Sussex, near the ocean.

Although James was the toast of London's literary society for much of his career, he really wished to be a dramatist, but one of his plays was poorly received and James himself was booed on opening night and that discouraged him.

James never managed to make much money or wide acclaim from his writing. It didn't bother him, but it did his friend Edith Wharton. Toward the end of James' life she lobbied for him to win the Nobel Prize, to no avail, and was in the midst of taking up a collection from his New York friends, intending to send him a 70th birthday present of cash, when he discovered her plot and intervened. But he never knew that one of his final book advances, for a novel that was still incomplete when he died, came from Wharton's own coffers. She'd proposed the scheme to his publisher, Charles Scribner, who wrote James out of the blue with the offer of $8,000 for a new book, a sum far greater than James' previous advances. James accepted, none the wiser. Scribner felt uncomfortable about it: "I feel rather mean and caddish and must continue so to the end of my days," he wrote to Wharton. "Please never give me away." She didn't; their secret was only discovered years later in Scribner's and Wharton's archives.

It's the birthday of ‘the Empress of the Blues’ Bessie Smith, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee (1894). As a child Smith sang and danced on street corners for coins. Her career began when blues singer Ma Rainey & her Rabbit Foot Minstrels came through Chattanooga, saw Bessie Smith, and took her on the road with them. A decade later, in 1923, Smith's first recording, Down Hearted Blues, sold more than two-million copies in the first year alone. She lived hard and that became part of her appeal. Tall and strong and sexy, she got in fist-fights, made no secret of her love affairs, and preferred gin, downing an entire tumbler at a time. The 150 blues numbers she recorded – backed by such great jazzmen as Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman – dealt with poverty, unrequited love, and cruelty. She died in Mississippi in 1937 after the car she in which she was riding rear-ended a slow-moving truck. Her best known tunes are "Downhearted Blues" (1923), "St. Louis Blues," with Louis Armstrong on trumpet (1925), and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" (1929).

Today is the birthday of original Renaissance Man, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, born in Tuscany in 1452, the son of a young, unmarried peasant woman and a notary. He received no formal schooling as a child beyond the most basic training in reading, writing, and math, but his burgeoning artistic talent led to his father apprenticing Leonardo out in his teen years to a local painter and sculptor.

One of Leonardo’s earliest commissions came from a Milanese family of nobles who requested a 16-foot tall bronze equestrian statue. Leonardo slowly carved a model from clay over the course of 12 years in preparation for the bronze casting. But a soon-to-be war with the French meant that any bronze that had been set aside for the statue was needed instead for the building of more cannons. Leonardo’s clay model was later destroyed in the fighting.

While he worked in many forms and fields, we know Leonardo today primarily as a painter. His pieces are some of the most well-known artworks in the medium’s history — the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man drawing among them. His renown as one of the world’s greatest painters is even more astonishing considering that only around 15 of his painted works survive today. He worked very slowly and often abandoned his projects before they were finished.

Elsewhere, Leonardo’s notebooks depict the brilliant mind of an inventor and the curiosity of a scientist. They contain assorted sketch plans for flying machines, solar power setups, and armored vehicles. Leonardo took extensive notes on matters of anatomy, geology, engineering, and physics. He wrote almost always in a mirror image script on the page. Some claim he did this for reasons of secrecy. But because he was left-handed, it may just have been easier for him to write from right to left.

Leonardo finally left Italy when the French King Francis I offered him the title of “Premier Painter and Engineer and Architect to the King.” Leonardo eagerly accepted, apparently holding no ill will toward the French after they had destroyed his clay equestrian model years before. Francis supported Leonardo through his old age. According to legend, Leonardo died in the arms of the king.

Curiously, Leonardo once wrote, “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.”

Today is the birthday of journalist and food writer Waverley Root (books by this author), born in Providence, Rhode Island (1903). He worked as a foreign correspondent for 30 years before he turned to food writing. He spent large stretches of his adult life — years at a time — in Paris but never felt like an expatriate; on the contrary, he felt “fundamentally and unshakably an American.” That didn’t stop him from criticizing American eating habits, however. He wrote in one of his essays, “One telltale sign that betrays the defective nature of our diet is the fact that the United States is the country of chewing gum. Working the jaws incessantly, uselessly and unbeautifully is an effort to deceive the body into the belief that it is being sufficiently well fed when it isn't.”

His first books had nothing to do with food. He published The Truth About Wagner (1928), three volumes of The Secret History of the War (1945–46), and Winter Sports in Europe (1956). The Food of France (1958), his best-known book, has never gone out of print. It’s a tourist guidebook, but instead of listing the sights one should see on a trip to France it suggests foods that one should eat. He also wrote books on the food of Italy, and his last book was titled simply Food (1981). It’s an essay collection and encyclopedia of food and food history. In it, he writes, “Before I left America for France in 1927, you were looked down upon if you ate garlic, and when I returned in 1940, you were looked down upon if you didn’t.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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