Family Stories
by Dorianne Laux

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,
I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger
sent out across the sill, landing like a gift
to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine
it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,
and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed
the people in his stories really loved one another,
even when they yelled and shoved their feet
through cabinet doors or held a chair like a bottle
of cheap champagne, christening the wall,
rungs exploding from their holes.
I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury
of the passionate. He said it was a curse
being born Italian and Catholic and when he
looked from that window what he saw was the moment
rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous
three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship
down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk
deep in the icing, a few still burning.

“Family Stories” by Dorianne Laux from Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems. © W. W. Norton and company, 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is the birthday of Sir Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin. He was born in Lochfield, Scotland, in 1881. He came into his lab one morning in 1928 to discover he'd left the lid off of a petri dish containing a Staphylococcus culture. The culture had become contaminated by a blue-green mold, and Fleming noted that right around the moldy spots, the bacteria were no longer growing. He isolated the mold and determined it was Penicillium notatum. His first thought was that it would be useful as a surface disinfectant, and he later proved that it was effective against bacterial influenza. He later said, "One sometimes finds what one is not looking for."

It's the birthday in Boston, 1909, of children's author Norma Farber (books by this author), who wrote all kinds of books including nonsense ballads, instructional alphabets, counting stories, all of which were written in rhyme and meant to be read aloud. She is best known for As I Was Crossing the Boston Common, which won the 1976 National Book Award; a turtle narrates the book, and tells about the animals he meets one day as he crosses the Boston Common, creatures that parade by him in alphabetical order.

It's the birthday of Pop artist Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1928).

It's the birthday of American historian Richard Hofstadter (books by this author), born in Buffalo, New York (1916). He wrote 13 books, two of which won the Pulitzer Prize for history: The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964).

And it was on this day in 1945 that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. It was the first time that a nuclear weapon was ever used in warfare, and only the second time that a nuclear weapon had ever been exploded. It was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15 in the morning. It exploded 1,900 feet above the ground. Capt. Robert Lewis watched the explosion from his cockpit and wrote in his journal, "My God, what have we done?"

Today is the birthday of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (books by this author), born in Lincolnshire, England (1809). He's said to have been one of the three most famous people in Britain in his day — as famous as Queen Victoria and William Gladstone, the prime minister. Tennyson had a turbulent upbringing. His father, the eldest son, was passed over for inheritance in favor of a younger brother, and was forced to take a position in the church. George Tennyson became bitter, and drank heavily, and took out his anger on his family. His mental instability was passed on to his children, all of whom suffered breakdowns or addictions of one kind or another during their lives. When he died, he left his widow and 11 children nothing but debt.

When Tennyson was 17, he published his first volume of poetry, which he co-authored with two of his brothers. He escaped to Cambridge later that year and made friends with several young men who were also interested in poetry. It was at Cambridge that he met Arthur Henry Hallam, a bright and promising fellow student who became Tennyson's closest friend. The two young men planned to write a volume of poetry together, but Hallam's father didn't approve of some of the verses, so Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyricalhimself in 1830. Hallam fell in love with Tennyson's sister Emily, and the two planned to marry. Tennyson's whole family was fond of Hallam, but the friendship was destined to be short-lived: Hallam died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1833, four years after he and Tennyson met.

It was a difficult time for Tennyson. His father had recently died, leaving the family almost penniless. His collection, Poems (1832) — while generally well received and containing some of his most famous works, including "The Lady of Shalott" — drew a couple of scathing reviews that Tennyson fixated on. He said of that time, "I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live." He continued to write poetry, but refused to publish any of it for 10 years. His 1842 collection, Poems, Two Volumes, received high praise from nearly every reviewer.

Seventeen years after Hallam's death, Tennyson published his 3,000-line monument to grief: In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). In it, he gathered together the shorter poems he had written in his grief over Hallam's death. Tennyson married his on-again, off-again sweetheart, Emily Sellwood, right after In Memoriam was published. He returned from his honeymoon to find that the book-length poem was a huge success, and later that year, he succeeded William Wordsworth as poet laureate. He became a huge celebrity, receiving invitations to political and society events as well as literary ones. He couldn't walk through London without attracting a throng of followers, and his home was a popular attraction for nosy tourists. Prince Albert had been a fan of Tennyson's for a few years and had even dropped in on him unannounced at his home on the Isle of Wight. After Albert's death in 1861, Queen Victoria invited Tennyson to pay a visit to the royal residence of Osborne, and the two developed a real affection for one another. The queen turned often to Tennyson's verse to help her through the loss of her husband, and she wrote in her diary, "Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort." The poem includes the famous lines:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.