School Closings
by Joyce Sutphen

The 10 o'clock news predicts it—
winter warnings and watches
in lavender and pink, and there we are
at the edge of the deepest purple.

Sometime in the middle of the night,
I wake and stumble through the dark to look
out onto the deck, the driveway, the street.
Everything is white, shagged with snow.

One must have that mind, I know, to be
able to go back to sleep and wake before
dawn to listen to the school closings,
the litany of town names reeled off

in alphabetical order, the announcer
enunciating each one: Albany, Alden, Amery.
Annandale, Anoka-Hennepin, Belgrade-Brooten-
Elrosa, Belle Plaine, Benson, Blooming Prairie

and all the way through to Waconia, Waseca,
Watertown-Mayer, Zumbrota-Mazeppa—
and (this just in!): Classes at Happy Hummus
Montessori School are also cancelled today.

“School Closings” by Joyce Sutphen. Reprinted with permission of the poet. (books by this author)

It’s the birthday of French physician René Laennec, born in Quimper, Brittany (1781). During his medical studies, he was trained to use sound to help him make a diagnosis. Eventually, he used his training to invent the stethoscope. His early version didn’t resemble the form we’re familiar with today, but it enabled him to hear the workings of the human body with much greater clarity. Laennec was eventually able to use his invention, which he considered his greatest legacy, to diagnose his own tuberculosis. He died at the age of 45.

On this date in 1897, the National Congress of Mothers, the forerunner of the National Parent-Teacher Association, or PTA, held its first convocation, in Washington, D.C. Founders Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst expected 200 people to attend the event; instead, they were greeted by more than 2,000 mothers, educators, fathers, laborers, and legislators from across the United States.

It’s the birthday of economist Thomas Robert Malthus (books by this author), born in Surrey, England (1766). In 1798, he published a pamphlet called An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he argued that the human population of the earth was growing at a faster rate than the food supply, and that war, disease, and famine were necessary in order to prevent overpopulation.

It is the birthday of the woman responsible for introducing the theories of Maria Montessori to America, writer Dorothy Canfield (books by this author), also known as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, born in rural Kansas in 1879. Her parents moved to Nebraska when she was very young, but her summers were spent in Arlington, Vermont, with her uncle. She was the author of many best-selling novels. She spent time in Europe and met Maria Montessori in Italy in 1912, and in the same year, wrote a book about her, A Montessori Mother (1912). This was followed by The Montessori Manual (1913) and Mothers and Children (1914). She promoted the Montessori principles of learning for its own sake. Maria Montessori had taught her that children learn best by doing things, not by passively accepting other people's ideas and pre-existing knowledge. The Montessori method teaches that children learn more by touching, seeing, smelling, tasting, and exploring than by just listening.

It's the birthday of science fiction writer Andre Norton, born Alice Mary Norton (books by this author) in Cleveland, Ohio (1912), who changed her name to “Andre” because she thought she'd have better luck selling her books as a man instead of a woman. Until 1951, Norton had written adventure stories, spy novels, and historical fiction, but after being asked to edit a series of sci-fi anthologies, she wrote her first book in that genre, Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. (1951) and primarily stayed with science fiction after that.

Norton wrote more than 130 novels in her 70 years as a writer, as well as nearly 100 short stories.

It’s the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell (books by this author), born in London, England (1930). Her parents had a terrible marriage and her mother was ill with multiple sclerosis that went undiagnosed for years, and so young Ruth began writing about her life as if it were a story happening to someone else.

While working as a reporter for a small, suburban London newspaper, she decided to write a detective novel for fun. It was titled From Doon with Death (1964), and it began an extremely popular series of detective stories starring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford.

In her first few novels, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford was overweight, sloppy, slow-moving, and tempted at times to stray; but over the years he’s become thinner, smarter and nicer. Rendell said, “At first I never saw him as a serious character, but if I was going to have to live with him, I had to make him tolerable.” Instead of being solitary and depressed like most detectives in mystery novels, Reginald Wexford is happily married with two children. Wexford last appeared in Rendell’s novel No Man's Nightingale (2013), before her death in 2015 at the age of 85.

Rendell said, “The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.”

It was on this day in 1913 that the Armory Show opened in New York City, the first comprehensive exhibition of modern art in this country. At the time, American art was dominated by the ultra-conservative National Academy of Design, which had no interest in nonrepresentational or experimental work. In 1912, a group of artists had gotten together and formed the Association for American Painters and Sculptors. One of these artists was the painter Walt Kuhn, who wrote to his wife: "My idea about the new society is this: a big broad liberal organization embracing every kind of art, even those which I do not like, one that will interest the public ... the thing must be started so that it can grow and be as big or bigger than the academy within two or three years."

The group decided that the best way to compete with the Academy would be to have a well-publicized exhibition. Kuhn and fellow artist Arthur Bowen Davies traveled to Europe to collect art for the show. They brought home work by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent Van Gogh, and many other artists.

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

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