Debtors
by Jim Harrison

They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?


Jim Harrison, “Debtors” from Complete Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Jim Harrison. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)

It's the birthday of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist who said, "If there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties" — Maureen Dowd (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1952), the youngest child of an Irish-born cop. She majored in English at Catholic University and then worked as an editorial assistant at The Washington Star where she said she "was almost fired every day because [she] couldn't take a decent phone message." She finally got promoted to reporter and was writing entertaining front-page stories with quirky details when the newspaper went out of business.

Two years after she'd applied to The New York Times, Anna Quindlen, then the deputy metropolitan editor at the Times, found some writing samples of Dowd's in a pile of old résumés and immediately offered her a job. Dowd joined the Times in 1983 as a reporter, and less than a decade later was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting. Then, in 1995, she got her own column on the New York Times Op-Ed page, just the fourth woman in the newspaper's history to do so.

In 1999 she won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, based on a series of articles she did on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. One of the articles began:

"The president must not lose his job. Not over this. Certainly, Bill Clinton should be deeply ashamed of himself. He has given a bad name to adultery and lying. He has made wickedness seem pathetic, and that's truly a sin. Kenneth Starr, all these years and all these millions later, has not delivered impeachable offenses. He has delivered a 445-page Harold Robbins novel."

She has a reputation around Washington as being both cutthroat and irresistible. Clinton's White House spokesman once said, "It's hard to get mad at her for any length of time. I'd call and yell at her, and I'd always end up laughing." One reporter called her a "sorceress," and another said she employs "mischievous destabilization."

In 2005 Maureen Dowd published a collection of essays called Are Men Necessary?; her title is a play on a tongue-in-cheek manual by James Thurber and E.B, White called Is Sex Necessary? She said, "I always subscribed to the Carole Lombard philosophy. 'I live by a man's code, designed to fit a man's world, yet at the same time I never forget that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick.'"

She said, "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."

It's the birthday of novelist John Dos Passos (books by this author), born in Chicago (1896). He moved around so much that he called himself a "hotel child," living in Mexico, Belgium, England, Washington, D.C., and on a farm in Virginia.

Dos Passos later attended Harvard where he was a classmate of E.E. Cummings. He went to Spain to study architecture after he graduated, but with the outbreak of World War I, he worked as a volunteer ambulance driver instead. He later enlisted in the United States Medical Corps as a private. He served in France and Italy and that experience inspired his anti-war novels, One Man's Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). When the war was over he worked as a newspaper correspondent in Spain, Mexico, and New York. He said, "People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them." His other books include the Manhattan Transfer (1925), and the famous U.S.A. Trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).

He said, "If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."

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

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