Flying Over West Texas at Christmas
by Billy Collins

Oh, little town far below
with a ruler line of a road running through you,
you anonymous cluster of houses and barns,
miniaturized by this altitude
in a land as parched as Bethlehem
might have been somewhere around the year zero—

a beautiful song should be written about you
which choirs could sing in their lofts
and carolers standing in a semicircle
could carol in front of houses topped with snow.

For surely some admirable person was born
within the waffle-iron grid of your streets,
who then went on to perform some small miracles,
placing a hand on the head of a child
or shaking a cigarette out of the pack for a stranger.

But maybe it is best not to compose a hymn
or chisel into tablets the code of his behavior
or convene a tribunal of men in robes to explain his words.

Let us not press the gold leaf of his name
onto a page of vellum or hang his image from a nail.
Better to fly over this little town with nothing
but the hope that someone visits his grave

once a year, pushing open the low iron gate
then making her way toward him
through the rows of the others
before bending to prop up some flowers before the stone.


Billy Collins, "Flying over West Texas at Christmas" from Aimless Love. © 2013 Billy Collins published by Random House. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of astronomer Johannes Kepler, born to a poor mercenary in Württemberg, Germany (1571). Kepler tracked the orbital path of Mars and published his three famous laws of planetary motion — which validated Copernicus’s theory of a sun-centered solar system — and later helped Isaac Newton discover the law of gravity. Kepler was nearly blind from a smallpox epidemic when he was three, and he developed the first eyeglass designs for nearsightedness and farsightedness. He was also the first to explain that the tides are caused by the moon, the first to propose that the sun rotates on an axis, and the first to use planetary cycles to calculate the year of the birth of Jesus Christ.

It’s the birthday of novelist and essayist Wilfrid Sheed (books by this author), born in London, England (1930). He moved to Pennsylvania when he was a boy and grew up in a tiny village where there were almost no other children, and he spent most of his free time playing baseball by himself. He said, “I became perhaps the outstanding solitary baseball player of my generation.”

He wrote several satirical novels about journalism, including The Hack (1963) and Max Jamison (1970). He also wrote several memoirs, including My Life as a Fan (1993), about his love of baseball, and In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery (1995).

Sheed once said, “The American male doesn’t mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.”

James Barrie’s play Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had its opening night on this day in 1904 (books by this author). Barrie was a successful playwright at the time, but he became obsessed with the production of Peter Pan. He rewrote the script more than 20 times. It was one of the most expensive productions ever attempted at that time, since it required the construction of harnesses and wires so that the actors could appear to fly around the stage.

It was also one of the first plays to acknowledge the existence of the audience. In the famous scene, Peter Pan asks members of the audience to clap if they believe in fairies, in order to save the life of Tinker Bell. Barrie was terrified that the audience might not clap, so he asked the orchestra to do so if necessary. But the audience did clap, and the play was a huge success.

It was on this day in 1978 that King Juan Carlos of Spain oversaw a democratic constitution which became effective following decades of dictatorship by General Francisco Franco. Franco came into power in 1939, at the end of the bloody Spanish Civil War, of which Albert Camus wrote:

“It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.”

By 1978, when Spain ratified a new constitution, King Juan Carlos had been in power for three years. He was the grandson of Alfonso XIII, the last reigning monarch of Spain before it became a republic. Juan Carlos had been born in Italy, but educated in Spain with Franco’s permission, and eventually Franco had selected Juan Carlos, made him a prince, and groomed him as his successor. In 1969 Juan Carlos was announced as heir-apparent to the regime, and it was generally expected that he would continue ruling in the same style as Franco. For the next few years Franco’s health continued to decline and Juan Carlos appeared with him at all state functions, praising Franco and the benefits that the dictator had brought to the country.

Despite his outward acts of loyalty to Franco, Juan Carlos was conducting secret meetings with the liberal opposition. His own father, Don Juan de Borbón, had been a proponent of a constitutional monarchy for decades. In October of 1975 Franco handed over full control to Juan Carlos, and the dictator died three weeks later.

King Juan Carlos presided over Spain’s transition to democracy, but it was a rough transition. The military and right-wing powers were furious that he seemed to be abandoning many of Franco’s policies, but the liberals were similarly dubious that a man personally trained in Franco’s image would be a force of change. The leader of the Communist Party dubbed him “Juan Carlos el Breve” — Juan Carlos the Brief — because everyone assumed his reign would be short. Meanwhile, violence flared up by Basque separatists and there was unrest among some of the fascists loyal to the old regime.

In 1977 Spain held its first democratic elections post-Franco and a new Spanish Parliament was assembled. From within it, a seven-member panel was chosen to draft a new constitution. The seven members represented different factions within the complicated and divided world of Spanish politics. They began working in secret in the fall of 1977 and seven months later they had finished a draft of the new constitution. They wanted to choose someone literary to write the preamble to the Constitution and settled on Enrique Tierno Galván, a professor, essayist, and leftist politician.

The Constitution was overwhelmingly approved by the legislature, translated into Spain’s other languages, and approved in a national referendum on December 6^th. The Constitution was signed into law by King Juan Carlos on this day in 1978.

Even after the Constitution was established the new democracy took a while to get on its feet. The biggest hurdle was an attempted military coup in 1981. Some of the coup members probably thought they could count on the king’s support, which would have restored absolute power to the monarchy. Instead, Juan Carlos appeared on national television, dressed in full military uniform, and denounced the coup. He said, “The Crown, the symbol of the permanence and unity of the nation, cannot tolerate, in any form, actions or attitudes of people attempting by force to interrupt the democratic process.”

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

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