| Parlor
by Rita Dove We passed through
on the way to anywhere else.
No one lived there
but silence, a pale china gleam, and the tired eyes of saints
aglow on velvet.
Mom says things are made
to be used. But Grandma insisted
peace was in what wasn't there,
strength in what was unsaid. It would be nice to have a room
you couldn't enter, except in your mind.
I like to sit on my bed
plugged into my transistor radio,
"Moon River" pouring through my head. How do you use life?
How do you feel it? Mom says things harden with age; she says
Grandma is happier now. After the funeral,
I slipped off while they stood around
remembering-away from all
the talking and eating and weeping to sneak a peek. She wasn't there.
Then I understood why
she had kept them just so: so quiet and distant,
the things that she loved. "Parlor" by Rita Dove, from On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Rita Dove. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. (buy now)
On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington. The march was the brainchild of civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who once said, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” They worked diligently for nearly two years, convincing members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put aside their differences and participate. The president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, needed support for the passage of his Civil Rights Act, and gave his approval, as long as there would be no violence. Two days of protests, speeches, and sit-ins were planned. On August 27, thousands of people began pouring into the city. They came by bus, train, and air from Milwaukee, St. Louis, Birmingham, California, with water jugs and picnic baskets and Bibles. Chicago and New York declared August 28 “Freedom Day” and gave workers the day off. The city of Washington, D.C., banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition, hospitals stocked blood plasma and canceled elective surgeries, and the Pentagon amassed 19,000 troops in the suburbs, just in case things got violent. There was not one single arrest, and no violence. Marchers linked hands, they sang, and they chanted all the way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where the 16th speaker of the day, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., began what would become one of the greatest speeches in history with, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” This past June, half a million protestors were in the streets in multiple cities on a single day in the wake of George Floyd's murder by police.
On this date 175 years ago, in 1845, the first issue of Scientific American was published. It’s the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, and it started as a four-page weekly newsletter. It was founded by Rufus Porter, son of a wealthy New England family and a painter and inventor in his own right. The first issue focused on improvements to the quality of passenger railway cars. Under Porter’s direction, Volume I frequently featured reports from the U.S. Patent Office; the issues also served up poetry and religious news. Porter sold the magazine 10 months later, for $800, to 22-year-old Orson Munn and 19-year-old Alfred Beach. They took over with the publication of Volume II, doubling the page count and dropping the reports on temperance and religion as being unsuitable for a science publication. They kept the poetry, though.
Today is the birthday of the father of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt (1749), the author of the epic drama Faust. He moved to Italy in 1786, and when he returned to Germany in 1788, he fell in love with a woman from Weimar, Christiane Vulpius, a 23-year-old who was 16 years his junior. That year, he wrote her an epithalamium, a specific type of poem written for a bride on the way to the marital chamber. But he didn’t actually marry her; instead, the couple lived together for 18 years unwed. They were still living together in 1806, unmarried and with children, when some of Napoleon’s French soldiers — who were drunk — broke into their home in Weimer one evening. Goethe was terrified, but Christiane started shouting at the soldiers, fending them off in hand-to-hand combat, and protecting the bewildered Goethe. After a prolonged skirmish, she pushed them out of the house and barricaded the kitchen and the cellar so the soldiers couldn’t try to steal any more of their food. Grateful to the brave and steadfast woman who’d saved his life and home, Goethe went down to a church the very next day and married her, his live-in girlfriend of 18 years.
Today is the birthday of the American illustrator Tasha Tudor (books by this author), born Starling Burgess in Boston (1915). In the 1970s, Tudor moved to Vermont and lived in a house that her son Seth built for her using only hand tools. She often said she wished she had been born in 1830, and she lived as if she had been. She was skilled at candle making, knitting, and weaving. She also made her own cheese and ice cream. She illustrated almost 100 children’s books, including editions of classics like Mother Goose, Little Women, and The Secret Garden. She wrote her first story, Pumpkin Moonshine (1938), for her husband’s niece. She also wrote a popular series about a village of corgi dogs; Tudor loved corgis and owned as many as 13 at once. When she wasn’t at work on illustrations, she could often be found tending her lush, lavish gardens. Tudor died in 2008, and her home is now a museum.
It’s the birthday of American poet Rita Dove (books by this author), born in Akron, Ohio (1952). Her father was the first African-American chemist to work in the Unites States tire industry; he was a research chemist at Goodyear. Her mother loved to read and often quoted Shakespeare while cooking. Dove’s parents encouraged their children to read widely and there were always a lot of books in the house. Dove remembers reading The Iliad when she was 10, calling it “an incredibly tense and interesting story.” She wrote her first poem at the age of 10, too. It was an Easter poem titled “The Rabbit with the Droopy Ear.” The last lines of the poem were, “Hip-hop hooray / Let’s toast him a cup / For now both ears are hanging up.” Dove played cello growing up and was an excellent student, even traveling to the White House as a Presidential Scholar. A high school teacher took her to hear the poet John Ciardi and Dove was entranced. She said: “I didn’t know writers could be real, live people, because I never knew any writers. Here was a living, breathing, walking, joking person, who wrote books.” At Miami University, she took a lot of creative writing courses and gradually realized she was scheduling her life around writing. Things clicked when she read Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” Dove says, “It was the first time I realized you didn’t have to be polite.” Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
