| Report from the West
by Tom Hennen
Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a
foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis-
ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang.
Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often
make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers
are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can
let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree
trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall
off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The
way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness
makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the
edge of infinity.
Tom Hennen, “Report from the West” from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. Copyright © 2013 by Tom Hennen. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)
On this day in 1967 the first modern hospice, St. Christopher’s, was founded by Cicely Saunders in London marking the beginning of modern palliative care and the hospice movement. Before becoming a physician Saunders served as a nurse and a social worker. In 1948 she fell in love with one of her patients, a dying Polish émigré who left her 500 pounds and planted the seed of what would become her life’s work. Saunders believed that people who were close to death deserved effective pain relief and treatment for both physical and emotional needs. She herself died in 2005 in the hospice she founded.
It's the birthday of mystery novelist John D. MacDonald (books by this author), born in Sharon, Pennsylvania (1916). He's famous for his novels featuring Travis McGee, a beach-bum detective who lives on a houseboat that he won in a poker game. MacDonald started reading when he was a kid after he almost died of scarlet fever. He spent a year in bed. He read all the books in the library. He served in the Army during World War II and he entertained his wife by writing her little stories in his letters, one of which she liked so much that she typed it up and sent it to the magazine Story, where it was published. John D. MacDonald had four months of severance pay when he came home from the Army and he spent those four months writing seven days a week, 14 hours a day. By the end of the year, he was making a living selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines. He used his mystery novels to criticize what he called American junk culture: fast food, bad TV, and suburban development. He said, "I am wary of a lot of things, such as ... time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants ... pageants, progress, and manifest destiny."
It's the birthday of poet Robert Graves (books by this author), born in London in 1895. His passion was poetry but he wrote novels to support himself and said, "Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat." He wrote historical novels such as I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1934) as well as his memoir about WWI, Goodbye to All That (1929).
It's the birthday of aviator Amelia Earhart, born in Atchison, Kansas, in 1897. She was the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic (in 1932). She also flew solo on the longer flight from Hawaii to California — the first person to manage that hazardous route (in 1935). Then, in 1937, she set out to fly around the world. After making it more than two-thirds of the way, she disappeared in the central Pacific, somewhere near the international dateline.
It's the birthday of Zelda Fitzgerald, born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama (1900) (books by this author). She met F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the military dances where he was stationed in Montgomery. He stood out from the crowd, wearing his Brooks Brothers uniform and his cream-colored boots. Zelda said, "He smelled like new goods." He told her that she looked like the heroine in the novel he was writing. They went on their first date on this day, her birthday, in 1918. Years later, in a letter to Scott, she wrote, "The night you gave me my birthday party ... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
