| I Married You
by Linda Pastan I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset. I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity––
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.
From QUEEN OF A RAINY COUNTRY by Linda Pastan. Copyright © 2006 by Linda Pastan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (buy now)
It's the birthday of John Cheever (books by this author), novelist and master of the short story, born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Called by some "the Chekhov of the suburbs," most of his stories feature middle-class Americans on New York City's Upper East Side, or its Hudson Valley suburbs. He's best known for his short stories, especially "The Enormous Radio" (1953) and "The Swimmer" (1964), but he also wrote four novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer(1977). In 1961, he wrote in his journal: "I have been a storyteller since the beginning of my life, rearranging facts in order to make them more significant. I have improvised a background for myself — genteel, traditional — and it is generally accepted." Part of the image he crafted was that of the man in the suit who rode the apartment building's elevator downstairs with all the other men in suits who were leaving for work in the morning. His daughter Susan later revealed: "From the lobby he would walk down to the basement, to the windowless storage room that came with our apartment. That was where he worked. There, he hung up the suit and hat and wrote all morning in his boxer shorts, typing away at his portable Underwood set up on the folding table. At lunchtime he would put the suit back on and ride up in the elevator." His journals reveal that he was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder; as one might expect, he writes volumes about himself, with little about his family or friends. The journals also reveal that he enjoyed going to church and was conflicted about his bisexuality, and they also show his ability to find significance in ordinary things, something that shaped so much of his fiction. From his journals: " I seem, after half a lifetime, to have made no progress, unless resignation is progress. There is the erotic hour of waking, which is like birth. There is the light or the rainfall, some ingenuous symbol by which one returns to the visible, perhaps the mature world. There is the euphoria, the sense that life is no more than it appears to be, light and water and trees and pleasant people that can be brought crashing down by a neck, a hand, an obscenity written on a toilet door."
It was on this day in 1937 that the Golden Gate Bridge opened to the public. The idea of the bridge was first broached in 1869 by Joshua Norton, an emigrant from London who had lost his fortune investing in Peruvian rice. In 1921, Joseph Strauss, a poet and engineer from Cincinnati submitted the first sketches of what would someday be an 8,981-foot-long cantilevered suspension bridge that linked San Francisco to Marin County. Residential architect Irving Morrow contributed the aesthetics: the design of the towers, the lighting scheme, and various Art Deco touches. On the day the bridge opened, schools and businesses were closed, and by 6 a.m., 18,000 people were waiting to cross the bridge. At the top of the hour, foghorns bleated, the tollgates opened, and the revelers began to cross the bridge. Some sprinted and others roller-skated, while a woman named Florence Calegari used stilts. Several people chose to walk backward, and many chose to tap-dance the entire way. There were harmonica players, marching bands, beauty queens, mayoral speeches, and by the end of the day, almost 200,000 people had walked the bridge. Joseph Strauss did not read a speech on opening day. Instead, he read a poem. It began, "At last, the mighty task is done."
It's the birthday of Frans Cornelis Donders, the Dutch physician who pioneered ophthalmology, the branch of medical science concerned with the structure, functions, and diseases of the eye. Donders was born in 1818 in Tilburg, a tiny, landlocked village that was the wool capital of the Netherlands. He was the last of nine children and the only boy among eight girls. Donders' research into the physiology of the eye led to major advances in the studies of astigmatism, nearsightedness, and farsightedness. He was among the first physicians to experiment with corrective lenses to improve the defects of vision. In 1851, Donders established The Netherlandish Hospital for Diseases of the Eye, the first eye hospital in the Netherlands. Donders is also responsible for the invention of the ophthalmotonometer, an early device used to test the tension of the eyeball for signs of glaucoma. In 1864, he published The Anomalies of Refraction and Accommodation, a magnificent contribution to physiological optics that is still used today.
It's the birthday of Julia Ward Howe (books by this author), born Julia Ward in New York City (1819). She was a poet, essayist, and leader of the women's movement, but she's best known to us today as the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," in which she wrote: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible, swift sword;
His truth is marching on." | 
