Playing Along
by Anita Pulier

The orchid arrived
swaddled in celebratory paper,
two curved stems balletically
balancing six improbable
naked blooms.

I, no youngster,
knew this might not end well.

Still, I played along,
placed the shameless display
near a gritty window,
watered the mossy base,
allowed sunlight
to ooze through the slats
of a dusty venetian blind,
invited light to invade
helter-skelter, fearlessly
nurturing extraordinary beauty
despite the lousy odds.
 

“Playing Along” by Anita Pulier from Sounds of Morning. © Finishing Line Press, 2017. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Sliced bread was sold for the first time on this date in 1928. Up until that time, consumers baked their own bread, or bought it in solid loaves. Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, had been working for years perfecting an eponymous invention, the Rohwedder Bread Slicer. He tried to sell it to bakeries. They scoffed, and told him that presliced bread would get stale and dry long before it could be eaten. He tried sticking the slices together with hatpins, but it didn't work. Finally he hit on the idea of wrapping the bread in waxed paper after it was sliced. Still no sale, until he took a trip to Chillicothe, Missouri, and met a baker who was willing to take a chance. Frank Bench agreed to try the five-foot-long, three-foot-high slicing and wrapping machine in his bakery. The proclamation went out to kitchens all over Chillicothe, via ads in the daily newspaper: "Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped — Sliced Kleen Maid Bread." Sales went through the roof. Rohwedder not only gave Americans the gift of convenience and perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but he also provided the English language with the saying that expresses the ultimate in innovation: "the greatest thing since sliced bread."

On this date in 1865, Mary Surratt became the first woman to be executed by the United States government. Surratt, a widow and Confederate sympathizer from Maryland, ran a boarding house in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, she had run a Maryland tavern that doubled as a safe house for Confederate spies. Her son John was friends with John Wilkes Booth, and often invited him to his mother’s boarding house. Authorities believed that Booth had plotted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln there, with Surratt’s knowledge and consent, if not active participation. Her son John had admitted to being Booth’s co-conspirator in a plot to abduct Lincoln and trade him for Confederate prisoners being held in Richmond, Virginia. When Booth assassinated the president, John Surratt fled to Canada and later to Europe. His mother was arrested along with four other conspirators.

Surratt went to the gallows with three other convicted traitors, all men. Even though she had been condemned in the court of public opinion as well by a military commission, people still became squeamish when they saw the news photos of a woman in a long black dress hanging from the gallows. Everyone, including the executioner himself, expected President Andrew Johnson to commute her sentence to life in prison. Five members of the commission that convicted her even asked him to commute. And Surratt’s 22-year-old daughter, Anna, pled tearfully to be allowed to talk to the president. She hoped he would pardon her mother because of her gender and her advanced age — which was 42 at the time. He refused all of these requests, saying, “She kept the nest that hatched the egg.”

Today is the birthday of American genetics pioneer Nettie Stevens, born in Cavendish, Vermont (1861). Her early life was a repeating cycle of working as a teacher or a librarian, saving up her money, and then going back to school to further her education. She finally finished her master’s degree and began work on her Ph.D. in biology when she was 39 years old; she worked as a researcher at the same time. While studying mealworms, she discovered that male sex cells could have either an X or a Y chromosome, while female sex cells could only carry X chromosomes. Based on this observation, she concluded that the sex of an organism was determined based on what chromosome it had inherited from its male parent.

It’s the birthday of American author, historian, and narrator David McCullough (books by this author), born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1933). After graduating from Yale University, he worked at Sports Illustrated as a writer, and then at American Heritage magazine.

McCullough has won two Pulitzer Prizes, both for nonfiction books about presidents. The first was for Truman (1993); the second was for John Adams (2001). John Adams was the fastest-selling nonfiction book in history and was made into an HBO miniseries (2008) starring Paul Giamatti in the title role.

For many years, he wrote in a small, windowed shed in the backyard of his Martha’s Vineyard home. He said, “Nothing good was ever written in a large room.”

When asked how he chooses which historical figure to write about, he admitted to quitting a project on the painter Pablo Picasso. He said: “He was an awful man. I don’t think you have to love your subject — initially you shouldn’t — but it’s like picking a roommate. After all, you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”

Today is the birthday of Gustav Mahler (1860), born in Kalischt, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic.

He made his public piano debut at 10, and was accepted to the Vienna Conservatory at 15. When he left school, he became a conductor, and then artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera. He became famous throughout Europe as a conductor, but he was fanatical in his work habits, and expected his artists to be, as well. This didn’t win him any friends, and there were always factions calling for his dismissal. He spent his summers in the Austrian Alps, composing.

1907 was a difficult year for Mahler: he was forced to resign from the Vienna Opera; his three-year-old daughter, Maria, died; and he was diagnosed with fatal heart disease. Superstitious, he believed that he had had a premonition of these events when composing his Tragic Symphony, No. 6 (1906), which ends with three climactic hammer blows representing “the three blows of fate which fall on a hero, the last one felling him as a tree is felled.”