Schwinn
by George Bilgere

One day my mother astonished me
by getting astride my bike,
the heavy old balloon-tired Schwinn
I used for my afternoon paper route,
and pedaling away down the street,

skirt flying, hair blown back,
a girl again in the wind and speed
that had nothing to do
with pulling double shifts at the hospital,
or cooking meatloaf, or sewing up my jeans,

the old bike carrying her away
from my father dead of booze,
and her own nightly bottle
of red wine in front of the news.

She flew down the road so far
I could barely see her,
then slowly pedaled back to me,
and stepped off the bike, my mom again.

“Schwinn” by George Bilgere from Blood Pages. University of Pittsburgh Press © 2018. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of Uncle Sam. He made his debut on this day in 1852 as a cartoon in the New York Lantern, drawn by Frank Henry Bellew. The name “Uncle Sam” had been used to refer to the United States since about 1810, but this was the first time that someone thought to make him into a character and draw him in human form.

It’s the birthday of American astronomer Percival Lowell, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1855). Percival Lowell studied mathematics and history at Harvard, and he went to work in the family’s textile conglomerate. He wasn’t happy in Boston, though; he spent a good deal of time traveling, especially in the Orient, and writing about his travels. In the 1890s, he became fascinated with Mars; astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (uncle of fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli) had discovered what appeared to be canals on the red planet. Lowell decided to devote his fortunes to studying Mars, believing that the canals offered proof of intelligent life, and so he built a private observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Even though scientists remained skeptical, Lowell’s vision of intelligent life on Mars captivated the public and had a huge impact on the infant literary genre that became known as science fiction.

On this date in 1781, English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus. He wasn’t the first keen-eyed observer to spot the planet — John Flamsteed noted it in 1690 — but he was the first one to figure out that it was a planet and not a star. He could tell by how slowly it was moving that it must be very far from the Sun, farther even than Saturn, which was the farthest known planet. He offered to name the planet “Georgium Sidus,” after his patron King George III, but it was decided instead to stick with the Greco-Roman deity theme. The planet was named after Ouranos, the Greek god of the sky. Over the years, astronomers have discovered 27 moons orbiting the blue-green ice giant, and they’ve named the moons after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Uranus’s axis is tilted so far that it appears to be lying on its side, and its rings circle the planet vertically.

It’s the birthday of writer Janet Flanner (books by this author), born in Indianapolis (1892). In 1922, at the age of 30, Flanner left for Paris with her female lover. She wrote: “We were the Americans who for one reason or another chose to dwell in Paris, for writing, for work, for career, for the amenities of French living, which was cheaper and more agreeable.”

Flanner planned to become a fiction writer, and she worked on a novel called The Cubical City and wrote a few poems. She also wrote letters back home to her family and friends,  and a friend connected her with The New Yorker. For the next 50 years, Flanner wrote nearly 700 installments of her Letter from Paris for The New Yorker under the name Genêt.

It’s the birthday of science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (books by this author), born Lafayette Ronald Hubbard in Tilden, Nebraska (1911). He started out writing for pulp magazines, and he was a prolific writer. In 1950, he published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950), which promised that a therapeutic process called auditing could erase a person’s cellular traces of traumatic experiences, and that this would cure any physical or mental ailment and increase intelligence. Psychiatrists and medical professionals spoke out against Dianetics, but the book became a best-seller. Hubbard used his ideas about Dianetics to found the Church of Scientology in 1954. In 1983, 11 church leaders were convicted for conspiracy. Hubbard wasn’t convicted, but he went into hiding and died of a stroke in 1986 on his ranch in California.

On this date in 2003, the journal Nature reported the discovery of 350,000-year-old fossilized human footprints in Italy. The Italian footprints reported in Nature are about eight inches long and four inches wide, and their makers were probably no taller than five feet.

Thousands of people reported mysterious lights over Arizona on this date in 1997.

It began around 8:00 p.m., when a man in Henderson, Nevada, saw a V-shaped object "the size of a 747," with six lights on its leading edge. The lights moved from northwest to southeast; over the course of the next hour, sightings were reported throughout Arizona, as far south as Tucson — a distance of nearly 400 miles. One cement truck driver reported that the lights hovered over Phoenix for more than two hours, and said: "I'll never be the same. Before this, if anybody had told me they saw a UFO, I would've said, 'Yeah and I believe in the Tooth Fairy.' Now I've got a whole new view and I may be just a dumb truck driver, but I've seen something that don't belong here."

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

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