| In a Tavern
by Louis Jenkins
"It's no use," he says, "she's left me." This is after
several drinks. It's as if he had said, "Van Gogh is
my favorite painter." It's a cheap print he has added
to his collection. He's been waiting all evening to
show it to me. He doesn't see it. To him it's an
incredible landscape, empty, a desert. "My life is
empty." He likes the simplicity. "My life is empty.
She won't come back." It is a landmark, like the
blue mountains in the distance that never change.
The crust of sand gives way with each step, tiny
lizards skitter out of the way .... Even after walking
all day there is no change in the horizon. "We're
lost," he says. "No," I say, "let's go on." He says,
"You go on. Take my canteen. You've got a reason
to live." "No," I say, "we're in this together and we'll
both make it out of here."
Louis Jenkins “In a Tavern” from Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970 – 2005. Copyright © 2009 Will o’ the Wisp. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose calculations guided space flight, born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, WV. The equations that controlled the trajectory of the flights were programmed into computers but the 1960s astronauts did not always trust the machines. Preparing for his Friendship 7 mission in 1962 John Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl” – meaning Johnson – to run the numbers by hand, on her desktop calculating machine. Glenn said, “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” Johnson was one of just a few Black women hired as mathematicians in the guidance and navigation department at NASA. Johnson died in February 2020.
It was on this day in 1968 that the Democratic Convention began in Chicago, a week that would become a crucible of the nationwide debate over the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election and Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the race – not by winning delegates himself in primaries but by inheriting those who had been pledged to Johnson and competing in caucus states. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota positioned himself as the peace candidate while Humphrey was roundly seen as loyal to Johnson’s Vietnam agenda and an apologist for the war. Expecting some 10,000 protesters as the convention approached, Mayor Richard Daley deployed 12,000 Chicago police officers, who joined several thousand more from the National Guard. Americans watched on television as protesters, many of them college students, were attacked and beaten with clubs. The amount of tear gas sprayed outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where Humphrey and much of the Democratic leadership stayed, was so great that it reached Humphrey inside his suite. Inside the convention hall, delegates argued bitterly over the presidential nomination and antiwar resolutions. Dan Rather and Mike Wallace of CBS News were roughed up by security guards inside, spurring Walter Cronkite to remark on air, "I think we've got a bunch of thugs here, if I may be permitted to say so." Convention visitors were appalled, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “at what they considered unnatural enthusiasm of police for the job of arresting demonstrators.” For his part Republican candidate Richard Nixon “loved every minute of the Democratic convention,” according to a biographer. Humphrey won the nomination, but Nixon beat him in November. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
