Why I'm Here
by Jacqueline Berger

Because my mother was on a date
with a man in the band, and my father,
thinking she was alone, asked her to dance.
And because, years earlier, my father
dug a foxhole but his buddy
sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug
another for himself. In the night
the first hole was shelled.
I'm here because my mother was twenty-seven
and in the '50s that was old to still be single.
And because my father wouldn't work on weapons,
though he was an atomic engineer.
My mother, having gone to Berkeley, liked that.
My father liked that she didn't eat like a bird
when he took her to the best restaurant in L.A.
The rest of the reasons are long gone.
One decides to get dressed, go out, though she'd rather
stay home, but no, melancholy must be battled through,
so the skirt, the cinched belt, the shoes, and a life is changed.
I'm here because Jews were hated
so my grandparents left their villages,
came to America, married one who could cook,
one whose brother had a business,
married longing and disappointment
and secured in this way the future.

It's good to treasure the gift, but good
to see that it wasn't really meant for you.
The feeling that it couldn't have been otherwise
is just a feeling. My family
around the patio table in July.
I've taken over the barbequing
that used to be my father's job, ask him
how many coals, though I know how many.
We've been gathering here for years,
so I believe we will go on forever.
It's right to praise the random,
the tiny god of probability that brought us here,
to praise not meaning, but feeling, the still-warm
sky at dusk, the light that lingers and the night
that when it comes is gentle.


Jacqueline Berger, “Why I’m Here” from The Gift That Arrives Unbroken. Copyright © 2010 by Jacqueline Berger. Used by the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

A group of miners called The Mariposa Battalion entered the Yosemite Valley on this date in 1851 hoping to drive out a tribe of Native Americans who lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and were threatening the miners' claims to the land and its ore.

One member of the party, Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, was bowled over by the valley's magnificence. He later wrote, "As I looked, a peculiar, exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears with emotion." Bunnell thought he named the valley after the Indian tribe they were pursuing, but he was mistaken. The tribe was called the Ahwahneechee people. "Yosemite" was the name given to them by the other tribes in the region as an insult, and it meant "Those who kill."

Today is the birthday of the humorist John O'Farrell (books by this author), born in Oxfordshire, England (1962). He had some success as a child actor and studied drama and English at Exeter University but gave up acting in favor of writing. He's a columnist, a stand-up comedian, and an author, and for many years, he worked as a writer for The Spitting Image, a British satirical puppet show on television in the 1980s and '90s. He's written novels and several books of nonfiction, including An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain: or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always (2009). His fourth novel, The Man Who Forgot His Wife (2012), was nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award — the only UK literary prize for comic fiction.

It's the birthday of director Quentin Tarantino (books by this author), born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1963), and raised in Los Angeles, near the airport. He dropped out of high school after ninth grade, took some acting classes, worked as an usher at an adult theater, and rewrote screenplays from memory. He skipped film school in favor of a job at a big video store in Southern California where he and his co-workers — all aspiring filmmakers — watched and analyzed movies all day. He got a few small acting jobs and sold a couple of screenplays but, as the cliché goes, he really wanted to direct. He got his break when Harvey Keitel read one of his scripts; Keitel was impressed so he helped Tarantino get the movie produced. That was Reservoir Dogs (1992). Two years later came his big hit, Pulp Fiction (1994).

Tarantino won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained (2012), a spaghetti western set in the Deep South about a slave-turned-bounty hunter's quest to find his estranged wife in the Deep South.

Today is the birthday of novelist and poet Julia Alvarez (books by this author), born in New York City (1950). She grew up in the Dominican Republic and came back to New York when she was 10 years old. She often writes about the experience of being caught between two cultures; her first book was a collection of poetry called Homecoming (1984), and her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), was based on the experiences Alvarez and her sisters had upon coming to New York. She also wrote a nonfiction book, Once Upon a Quinceañera (2007), about the tradition of throwing elaborate 15th birthday parties for young Latina women.

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

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