Searchers
by Jim Harrison

At dawn Warren is on my bed,
a ragged lump of fur listening
to the birds as if deciding whether or not
to catch one. He has an old man's
mimsy delusion. A rabbit runs across
the yard and he walks after it
thinking he might close the widening distance
just as when I followed a lovely woman
on boulevard Montparnasse but couldn't equal
her rapid pace, the click-click of her shoes
moving into the distance, turning the final
corner, but when I turned the corner
she had disappeared and I looked up
into the trees thinking she might have climbed one.
When I was young a country girl would climb
a tree and throw apples down at my upturned face.
Warren and I are both searchers. He's looking
for his dead sister Shirley, and I'm wondering
about my brother John who left the earth
on this voyage all living creatures take.
Both cat and man are bathed in pleasant
insignificance, their eyes fixed on birds and stars.


Jim Harrison, “Searchers” from Saving Daylight. Copyright © 2007 by Jim Harrison. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1790 that the Aztec Sun Stone was discovered in Mexico City. It was found by workers who were doing repairs and unearthed a huge stone covered in symbols. The stone is 12 feet in diameter and three feet thick, carved during the 15th century. The center of the stone depicts the sun god and the story of creation, and around the edges it is carved with a solar calendar and the cardinal points of the universe. But most archeologists think that it was used mostly as a stone for human sacrifice. In the Aztec culture, human sacrifices were a way of keeping the sun in motion, and by doing that, keeping the rest of the world alive as well.

It's the birthday of writer William Safire, (books by this author) born William Safir in New York City (1929) — he added the "e" later on to make the pronunciation easier. His father was a successful thread manufacturer, and he was the youngest of three sons. But when he was four and his older brothers were teenagers, his father died of lung cancer, and life got harder. His mother told her sons: "All you have in this world is blood and friendship."

Young William was smart, a good writer, and he practiced his writing with long, funny letters to his brother in the Army. He graduated from the Bronx School of Science and got a scholarship to Syracuse University. But after two years, he decided that school was not as interesting as his summer job working for Tex McCrary, a columnist and radio and TV host. So he dropped out. He said he realized that he "could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels."

He interviewed movie stars and gangsters. He organized the rally that helped convince Eisenhower to run for the presidency. He said, "This is what it's all about. From what I could see, you could get a bunch of people together, whip up the press and have some impact." He set up the famous "kitchen debate" in Moscow, between Nixon (then vice president) and Khrushchev. The debate took place in a model home built by All-State Properties — Safire was their public relations agent. The home was designed for the American Exhibition in Moscow, and it was supposed to be affordable to anyone, and represent the success of American capitalism. Safire organized the debate in order to get publicity for his company, and he took a famous photo of the event. Nixon was so impressed with Safire that he hired him for his 1960 presidential campaign. Nixon lost, but Safire stuck with him, and was the main speechwriter for Spiro Agnew in the 1968 presidential campaign, and for the Nixon White House after that. He and fellow speechwriter Pat Buchanan loved to write speeches full of clever linguistic twists. In a speech that Safire wrote for Agnew, delivered in San Diego in 1970, he said: "In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism." Agnew had plenty of other alliterative insults for critics of Nixon's foreign policy, many of them written by Safire, including "vicars of vacillation," "pusillanimous pussyfooters," "supercilious sophisticates," and "the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."

After the Watergate scandal, Safire resigned and got a job as a White House correspondent for The New York Times. There, he was able to use his political savvy as well as his love of words — he started a column called "On Language," which was published weekly in the New York Times Magazine from 1979 until his death, in 2009, at the age of 79.

He said, "If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself."

On this day in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright had their first successful flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The brothers picked Kitty Hawk because it was full of sand dunes that would cushion crash landings and it had high winds to help get the plane off the ground.

The plane was unpredictable, he couldn’t plan out his moves, and he relied purely on instinct to adjust the plane up and down. Within a few moments he overcompensated, nearly flipped the glider over and shouted to his brother, “Let me down!” Suffering months of spin-outs, broken struts, blackened eyes, and crash landings, the brothers left Kitty Hawk early. On the train back, Wilbur told his brother, “Not within a thousand years will man ever fly.”

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

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