My Mother, Pretending to Move to Alaska
by Faith Shearin

For thirty years my mother pretended she was moving
to Alaska. She owned no maps of the state
and did not try to visit; she lived on a hot island
in North Carolina and could not drive
in the snow, owned a thin winter coat,
no boots or gloves. My mother survived things
she hated by pretending she was leaving:
baby showers, years of teaching in classrooms
where children built fleets of paper airplanes.
She told me sometimes about Alaska:
a place where she would live so far from
the neighbors they could not maintain an interest
in her business, a place where there
was so much snow she would not ever
mow the lawn. On bad days my mother imagined
who she would be in that eternal winter:
rugged, adventurous, warm because
she was not thin. My mother was going
to Alaska and if she never got there
it was because her Alaska was not on any map
and could not be reached by boat or bobsled;
her Alaska was a blizzard of privacy
and imagination, its borders hidden or revealed
by the snow drifts in her mind.
 

“My Mother, Pretending to Move to Alaska” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Austin State University Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this date in 1928 that Louis Armstrong and his band, the Hot Five, recorded "West End Blues." Armstrong was 26 years old at the time, and living in Chicago, where he'd been for six years. He'd moved there from New Orleans as part of Joe "King" Oliver's band; Oliver had been a friend and mentor to the young singer and trumpeter since Armstrong was a teenager. They parted ways in 1925. Oliver composed "West End Blues" and had just recorded his own version a few weeks earlier, but Armstrong's cover, recorded in Chicago's OKeh studio, is legendary. It features Earl "Fatha" Hines on piano, and it's one of the first recorded examples of Armstrong's trademark "scat" singing.

The recording took the jazz world by storm. An ecstatic audience carried Armstrong off the stage when he performed the song live one night. Jazz composer Gunther Schuller wrote that the record "made it clear jazz could never again revert to being entertainment or folk music. The clarion call of 'West End Blues' served notice that jazz could compete with the highest order of musical expression. Like any profoundly creative innovation, [it] summarized the past and predicted the future."

It's the birthday of comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York (1926). While Brooks was in the Army in World War II, deactivating mines after the Battle of the Bulge, he was also organizing shows for fellow servicemen. When he returned to the States, he worked as a drummer and pianist in the Catskills, taking over for an ailing stand-up comedian one night. In 1949, Brooks' friend Sid Caesar asked him to write for his comedy program, Your Show of Shows. In 1968, he wrote his first feature film, The Producers. Although the movie didn't do well at the box office, it has been made into a Broadway musical, winning 15 Tony Awards. He's known for off-the-wall comedies such as Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), and Spaceballs (1987).

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”: philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (books by this author), born on this day in Geneva (1712). In 1749, the Academy of Dijon sponsored an essay contest, and the question was: “Has the revival of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or to purify morals?” Rousseau was delighted by the question, and he said that his head was so full of ideas he was unable to breathe. He said: “And that is how I became a writer almost against my will. ... The remainder of my life and all my subsequent misfortunes were the inevitable result of this moment of aberration.” He worked feverishly on his essay, “A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.” He argued that the advances of science and art had been harmful to humanity by consolidating power in the hands of governments and creating an atmosphere of competition and fear between citizens. His essay won first prize, and he went on to write many more philosophical works, including his most famous, The Social Contract (1762), in which he said that the natural condition of humanity is to be brutal and lawless, and that it is through an agreed “social contract” of what constitutes a good society that humans are able to rise above their base nature.

Today is the birthday of the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley (1703) (books by this author). He was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, and his father was a Nonconformist — a dissenter from the Church of England. Wesley studied at Oxford, where he decided to become a priest. He and his brother joined a religious study group that was given the nickname “the Methodists” for their rigorous and methodical study habits; the name wasn’t meant as a compliment, but Wesley hung onto it anyway and managed to attract several new members to the group, which fasted two days a week and spent time in social service.

By 1739, he felt he wasn’t really reaching people from the pulpit, so he took to the fields, traveling on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. He began recruiting local laypeople to preach as well, and ran afoul of the Church of England for doing so. He believed that Christians could be made “perfect in love” when their actions arose out of a desire to please God and to promote the welfare of the less fortunate.

Wesley was an ardent abolitionist and tireless man. He traveled 250,000 miles, preached 40,000 sermons, and wrote, translated, or edited more than 200 volumes. He made £20,000 for his publications but gave most of it away and died in poverty. Though there’s no evidence that he actually wrote it himself, “John Wesley’s Rule” does a fair job of summing up his life:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.