Remembering Summer
by W. S. Merwin

Being too warm the old lady said to me
is better than being too cold I think now
in between is the best because you never
give it a thought but it goes by too fast
I remember the winter how cold it got
I could never get warm wherever I was
but I don’t remember the summer heat like that
only the long days the breathing of the trees
the evenings with the hens still talking in the lane
and the light getting longer in the valley
the sound of a bell from down there somewhere
I can sit here now still listening to it


“Remembering Summer” by W.S. Merwin, currently collected in Garden Time. Copyright © 2016 by W.S. Merwin, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick (books by this author), born in Piscataway Township, New Jersey (1957). He finds that being from New Jersey is a useful excuse for a host of social missteps: "Whenever I stumble over my own feet, or blurt out a thought that makes no sense at all, or leave the house wearing one pattern too many, I always think, ‘It's okay, I'm from New Jersey.’ I love New Jersey, because it's not just an all-purpose punch line, but probably a handy legal defense, as in, 'Yes, I shot my wife because I thought she was Bigfoot, but I'm from New Jersey.'"

His plays include I Hate Hamlet (1991), Jeffrey (1995), The New Century (2008), and most recently Big Night (2017).

It's the birthday of comedian Paula Poundstone (books by this author), born in Huntsville, Alabama (1959). She said: "The summary letter written by my kindergarten teacher in May of 1965, I believe it was, says, 'I have enjoyed many of Paula's humorous comments about our activities.' I just like that a lot." She went to high school, but she said, "I didn't actually graduate because there was a parking lot that needed hung-out in and I didn't want the brainy kids to have to take an extra shift." Instead, she started trying to make it as a stand-up comedian, first in Boston, then in San Francisco. She said: "The art — and that may be too highfalutin a term for what I do — but, you know, the quote-unquote art of stand-up comedy was wildly popular in the '80s. Just to keep it all in perspective, our grass was kind of cut by karaoke. So, you know, nothing to brag about there." She became famous for incorporating so much improvisation into her routines, and she moved from comedy clubs to theaters, colleges, and corporate events.

In 2006, she wrote a memoir that's also a biography of various historical figures. It's called There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say. Her most recent book is The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness (2017).

She said, "Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up 'cause they're looking for ideas."

It was on this day in 1916 that James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in New York City (books by this author). Back in 1904, Joyce wrote a short piece called "A Portrait of the Artist" about the challenges of developing as an artist in Irish society. He submitted it to the Irish magazine Dana, but it was rejected — the editor explained: "I can't print what I can't understand." Joyce decided to take his piece in a totally different direction, and on his 22nd birthday, he began to turn it into a novel, which he titled Stephen Hero. In a letter to a friend a couple of years later, he said that he had written 914 pages and that the novel was half finished. It was a fairly conventional novel, written in a traditional form.

Several years after beginning work on Stephen Hero, Joyce decided to rewrite once again. This time, he still wanted to write a novel, but much shorter and in a less traditional style. This became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's first published novel. It was turned down by many publishers until finally New York-based B.W. Huebsch, who had a reputation for publishing excellent but controversial writers, agreed to publish it.

It's the feast day of martyred St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his own cathedral on this day in 1170 by four knights of King Henry II. Henry II and Thomas Becket had been close friends when Henry made Becket Archbishop. Becket told him, "You will soon hate me as much as you love me now, for you assume an authority in the affairs of the church to which I shall never assent." When Henry said, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome cleric?" the knights believed it was Henry's wish that Becket should die.

It's the anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, in South Dakota, two weeks after the killing of Chief Sitting Bull. White authorities, made anxious by the spread of the new "Ghost Dance" religious fervor that had swept western Indian reservations during the previous year, had decided on a crackdown. The Ghost Dance called for the arrival of a messianic figure who would restore the buffalo to the plains, make the white men disappear, and bring back the old Native American way of life. When Sitting Bull was killed, Chief Big Foot led his band of Lakota Sioux toward the Pine Ridge Agency, where they were surrounded by the 7th Cavalry. Two hundred of Big Foot's people, including women and children, were killed.

It's the birthday of actress Jennifer Ehle, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1969). She starred as Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice (1995), with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. The miniseries was six hours long and used most of the original dialogue from Jane Austen's novel. The original broadcast was watched by more than 11 million people, and when it came out on VHS, 70,000 copies of the movies were sold within a week.

It was on this day in 2003 that Marja Sergina, the last known speaker of the Akkala Sami language, died. Akkala Sami was spoken in villages on Russia's Kola Peninsula inhabited by the Sami, an ethnic group from Northern Europe who are best known as reindeer herders.

There are more than 6,000 languages spoken in the world, and on average, one goes extinct about every two weeks.

It was on this day in 1989 that playwright Václav Havel (books by this author) was elected president of Czechoslovakia, ending more than 40 years of Communist rule.

He said: "I understand, especially when one is looking at me from a distance, that I might seem as some kind of fairy-tale hero who banged his head against the wall until the wall fell, and then reigned. It makes me blush slightly, because I know my mistakes. On the other hand, I do not ridicule it because people need these kinds of stories."

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

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