Cosmetic
by Jim Daniels

Last week my mother had eyebrows tattooed on.
She asks how they look. She's legally blind—
I could tell her anything.

It's been raining all day, shame's mad swirl
circling the house. No more cigarettes, coffee.
No more booze. You've got to keep going, I tell her.

I could be Annie in her cute red curls. You can
bet your bottom dollar. Pretty soon I'll be
tap-dancing on the coffee table, or up in my old room

crying. She's fingering the earphones of her books-
on-tape machine. She's been saving up things
to tell me. She ticks them off like the giant

grocery list graffitied to her fridge. I've collected
scraps of her old handwriting, the graceful swirls

of confidence. 75 years of good vision. She's rounding
everything off into simple shapes. I'm staring

at the all-weather eyebrows. A cartoon looking
for the punch line. I run my finger over them.

She startles, then relaxes. It made her sneeze,
my father offers up from the kitchen

where he's spending a lot more time. Your father
stopped saying 'Bless you' pretty fast.

Good. Great. Fantastic. Exquisite. The eyebrows
to top all eyebrows. The king and queen of eyebrow.

Listen to the rain, she says.
Just listen to it coming down.
 

Jim Daniels, “Cosmetic” from Birth Marks. Copyright © 2013 by Jim Daniels. Used by permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

Today is Labor Day. The first Labor Day was celebrated 137 years ago, on Tuesday, September 5, 1882. The holiday was the idea of the Central Labor Union in New York City, which organized a parade and a picnic featuring speeches by union leaders. It was intended to celebrate labor unions and to recognize the achievements of the American worker.

On that first Labor Day, 20,000 workers crowded the streets in a parade up Broadway. They carried banners that said, "Labor creates all wealth" and "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for recreation!" After the parade, people held picnics all over the city. They ate Irish stew, homemade bread, and apple pie. When it got dark, fireworks went off over the skyline. The celebrations became more popular across the country in the next 10 years. In 1894, Congress made Labor Day a national holiday.

Today, for most Americans, Labor Day marks the end of summer and the last day before the start of the school year.

It was on this day in 1901 that Theodore Roosevelt uttered his famous words "Speak softly and carry a big stick." He was vice president at the time and was giving a speech at the Minnesota State Fair. He continued: "If the American nation will speak softly and yet continue to build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient Navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far."

This Monroe Doctrine that he was talking about was a policy dating back to 1823, from a speech that President Monroe delivered at one of his State of the Union addresses. At the time, a lot of colonies in Latin America were struggling for independence from Spain, and the U.S. was worried that other European powers might step in and take over these fledgling republics, claiming them their own colonies instead.

So President Monroe said that if any European nations tried to newly colonize any Latin American lands, the United States would consider this a sign of aggression and would intervene to fight off these would-be European colonizers.

Monroe likely meant for this policy to deal with immediate problems of protecting newly independent lands, but the words he said took on a life of their own. Teddy Roosevelt bolstered and expanded the idea of America policing the Western Hemisphere with his Big Stick diplomacy, which he described as "the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis." He passed it off as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine and its spinoffs have served as a central part of America's foreign policy since then, invoked by many presidents. In the intervening years, it's been the precedent for U.S. intervention in Latin American countries like Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Cuba.

Less than two weeks after Vice President Teddy Roosevelt uttered these famous words at the Minnesota State Fair, President William McKinley was assassinated, and Teddy Roosevelt found himself the youngest person ever to serve as president of the United States. His Big Stick diplomacy, as it came to be known, served as the centerpiece of America's foreign policy under his administration.

On another occasion, he said, "If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble, and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power."

The Great Fire of London started on this date in 1666. It began around 1 a.m. in the King's bakery, on Pudding Lane. The buildings in medieval London were nearly all wooden and the fire quickly spread to the wharves on the Thames River, where oil and hemp, hay, and timber were stored. There the fire exploded, and over the next three days destroyed an area nearly two miles square in central London that encompassed more than 13,000 homes, and nearly 90 churches, including St. Paul's Cathedral, whose lead roof melted and flowed away down Ludgate Hill. Although it was the worst fire in the city's history, there were only four reported casualties. The fire may also have halted the progress of the plague, which had been ravaging the city for the past few years. The rats and their disease-carrying fleas perished in large numbers.

Architect Christopher Wren was given the task of rebuilding 50 churches, including St. Paul's Cathedral, which remains one of his masterpieces.

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