At Home
by Linda Gregg

Far is where I am near.
Far is where I live.
My house is in the far.
The night is still.
A dog barks from a farm.
A tiny dog not far below.
The bark is soft and small.
A lamp keeps the stars away.
If I go out there they are.


Linda Gregg, "At Home" from All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems. © 1985 Linda Gregg. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, L.L.C on behalf  of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. (buy now)

Today is the first day of spring, the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The Earth is tilted on its axis, so as it travels around the sun each pole is sometimes tilted toward the sun and sometimes tilted away. It is this tilt that causes the seasons, as well as the shortening and lengthening of daylight hours. On this day the North and South Poles are equally distant from the sun, so we will have almost exactly the same amount of daytime as nighttime.

Emily Dickinson said: “A little Madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Spring still makes spring in the mind,
When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old.”

Mark Twain said, “It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”

On this day in 1916 Albert Einstein (books by this author) published his theory of general relativity. The theory proposed that massive objects, like planets, create a distortion in space-time that is felt as gravity.

Relativity is important for many technologies today. For example, GPS satellites need to take into account imperceptible changes in time described by relativity — just a few microseconds — due to their high speed. If they did not do this, they would be off in their distance calculations by several miles after only one day.

When Einstein was asked what he would have done if his theory of general relativity had not held up, he replied, “Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”

It was on this day in 1852 that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published (books by this author). She lived with her husband in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a slave state. She was upset by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which forced both authorities and private individuals in the Northern free states to cooperate with the slave states to track down and return slaves. So she decided to write a book about slavery. She couldn’t figure out a plot, until one day, while she was in church, she had a vision of an old slave. He became Uncle Tom, and she started writing. In 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, selling 10,000 copies in its first week, and about 2 million copies by 1857.

It’s the birthday of playwright Henrik Ibsen (books by this author), born in Skien, Norway (1828). His father was a merchant, but when the boy was seven, his father’s business failed and the affluent family lost all their money. Their friends abandoned them, they moved to a dilapidated country house, and his parents couldn’t afford to continue their son’s schooling beyond the age of 15. Ibsen was apprenticed to an apothecary in a very small town.

In 1850, after six years with the apothecary, Ibsen moved to Norway’s capital city of Christiania (now Oslo). He intended to study medicine at the university, but he failed his entrance exams. That same year, his second play, The Burial Mound, was staged, but it was a flop. Soon after he met Ole Bull, a famous violinist and a passionate champion of restoring Norwegian culture — Norway was recently independent of Denmark, who had occupied it for more than 400 years. Bull was in the process of co-founding a theater in Bergen — it would be the first theater in which actors spoke in Norwegian instead of Danish. Despite Ibsen’s recent failures, Bull recognized the young man’s talent and offered him a position as a writer and manager at the new theater. There Ibsen staged more than 140 plays, including five original works, and received a crash course in all aspects of theater work. From there he went on to manage a new theater in Christiania, but it was a disaster — he was constantly attacked in the press, and the theater eventually went bankrupt. Ibsen was living in poverty, drinking constantly, and his writing suffered. He was turned down for government grants. Finally, some of his worried friends raised private funds to supplement a small government grant and send him to Rome to work.

Ibsen fell in love with Rome. He enjoyed the warmth and sunshine, the art and relics, the people, and the landscape. He found no shortage of inspiration. In January of 1865, he wrote to a friend: “How glorious nature is down here! Both in form and color there is an indescribable harmony. I often lie for half a day among the tombs on the Via Latina, or on the old Appian Way; and I do not think this idling can be called waste of time.” He then asked his friend for more money, and added, “You may be quite certain that I shall join forces with you cordially in everything when I get home; for home I shall go, although I believe I said the contrary in the letter which I now wish and hope you may not have read.”

That year he finished his play Brand (1866), a tragedy about a priest so committed to his rigid moral code that he loses his family. A year later he published Peer Gynt (1867), a satire of Norwegian culture based loosely on a fairy tale. These two plays made Ibsen famous and brought him critical and commercial success. Despite his promise to his friend, he didn’t return home for 27 years.

Ibsen’s other plays include Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and Hedda Gabler (1890).

He said, “You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”

It’s the birthday of psychologist B.F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner (books by this author), born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania (1904). He was the leading exponent of the school of psychology known as behaviorism, which explains the behavior of humans and animals in terms of their psychological responses to external stimuli. He coined the term operant conditioning to describe the phenomenon of learning as a result of an organism responding to its environment. He did extensive research with animals, notably rats and pigeons, and invented the famous Skinner box, in which a rat learns to press a lever in order to obtain food.

And it’s the birthday of beloved children’s television host Fred Rogers, born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

In 1962, Rogers earned a divinity degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and he was ordained by the Presbyterian Church. Rogers continued his work in television, appearing on camera for the first time in 1963 on his new show, Misterogers, which was aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This show would evolve into Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which was seen nationally in the US for the first time in 1968.

The show, which began with Rogers singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and changing into sneakers and a cardigan, would go on to become the longest-running show on PBS. The program featured themes like feeling good about yourself, getting along with others, and handling fears. Rogers wrote more than 200 songs for the show. The last episode was taped in December 2000.

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

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