If Life Were Like Touch Football
by Julie Cadwallader-Staub

Driving north on Route 2A
from Vermont to Maine
listening to the news:
—the New England Patriots coach was caught
trying to videotape the handsignals of the New York
Giants—

I remember how we six sisters
would recruit a few boys from the neighborhood
for a pick-up game of touch football in the street,
how we'd break into teams,
huddle around whomever was chosen to be qb,
how the qb would extend her left palm, flat,
into the middle of the huddle,
plant the index finger of her right hand in the center of her
palm, and then
with finger motions and whispers,
she would diagram who was to go where and when,
in order to so confuse and fool the other team
that one of us could break free
and go long.

Oh that feeling
of running as fast as I could
extending my arms, my hands, my fingers
as far as I could
watching that spiraling bullet of a football,
reminding myself:
if you can touch it,
you can catch it.
If you can touch it,
you can catch it.


"If Life Were Like Touch Football" by Julie Cadwallader-Staub, from Face to Face. © DreamSeeker Books, 2010. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1950 that Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (books by this author) died, at the age of 94. But it was not old age that he succumbed to, nor disease — the nonagenarian fell off a ladder while pruning trees in his garden and died later from complications of his injury.

Shaw outlived most of his friends, among them many literary luminaries, but he did not seem particularly sentimental about this. Once, he was asked whether he missed any of his contemporaries, and he responded, "No, I miss only the man I was." And he once proclaimed, "Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed."

While he was still alive, devoted fans wanted to start a Shaw society to promote his ideas. He was adamantly against the whole thing, writing the people who contacted him about it.

But he sort of gave up resistance, and a Shaw society was founded in 1941, on his 85th birthday. The effort was led by a Jewish refugee from Germany. Shaw wrote: "Go ahead, but don't bother me about it. I am old, deaf, and dotty. In short, a Has Been." The Shaw society is still going strong; it gathers one Friday evening a month at the Actors Centre in London’s Soho for lectures and readings of his plays. During the pandemic, they have been meeting on Zoom.

George Bernard Shaw said: "What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day."

And he said: "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

It's the birthday of critic and novelist Thomas Mallon, (books by this author) born in Glen Cove, New York (1951). He said, "[I had] the kind of happy childhood that is so damaging to a writer … where our fathers were all World War II veterans and our mothers were always at home."

He was the first member of his family to go to college, and he became a professor of literature. He had been teaching for several years, writing academic essays on the side, when he decided to write a book about diaries. He assumed it would be an academic work, with a small audience, but as he read the personal diaries of many important writers, he began to develop his own personal writing voice. The book he wrote, called A Book of One's Own (1984), included diary entries from Virginia Woolf, Dostoyevsky, pioneer farmers, and even Thomas Mallon himself. It became a big success, and Mallon was suddenly able to quit teaching and become a literary journalist.

His other novels include Henry and Clara (1994), Dewey Defeats Truman (1997), Bandbox (2004), and Fellow Travelers (2007), about a gay couple living in Washington during the McCarthy era.

It's the birthday of the frontiersman Daniel Boone, born on this day in 1734 near Reading, Pennsylvania. When he was young, his family moved to North Carolina, where Daniel loved to hunt in the forest. He educated himself by taking books with him on his hunting trips. He went on long hunting and exploring expeditions, and he crossed the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

Even during his lifetime, Boone was a figure of legend. He was captured by Indians, and he lived with them as an adopted son before he escaped.

Daniel Boone was a man of few words, so his biographers took free rein and invented long, eloquent speeches for him. They also embellished the facts — these biographies have Boone wrestling with bears or swinging away from Indians on vines. He became so famous as a pioneer hero that the poet Lord Byron included him as a character in his epic poem Don Juan, in 1823.

Daniel Boone, who said, "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."

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

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