Gold
by Donald Hall

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow roses
pressing from a clear bowl. All day
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep
gold of your thighs and your back.
We slept and woke
entering the golden room together,
lay down in it breathing
quickly, then
slowly again,
caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily
touching my hair now.

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.

“Gold” by Donald Hall from Selected Poems of Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt © 2015. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call. Bell's telephone used a liquid transmitter: a diaphragm that caused a needle to vibrate in water, similar to the way sound waves vibrate in air. He spoke to his assistant, electrical designer Thomas Watson, who was in the next room. He said, "Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you." Later that day, he wrote an excited letter to his father. He wrote, "The day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water and gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home."

"Hello" is, of course, the standard greeting when most English-speaking people answer the phone, but this was not Bell's preferred greeting, and it was some time before the protocol was sorted out. In The First Telephone Book, author Ammon Shea tells us that Bell favored "Ahoy!" and stubbornly used it for the rest of his life. His competitor Thomas Edison, on the other hand, preferred "Hello." Shea posits that "hello" caught on in part due to the "How To" section in early phone books, which recommended "a hearty 'hulloa'" as a proper greeting. The phone book's recommended sign-off — "That is all!" — never took root.

It was on this day in 2006 that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reached Mars. Its purpose: to study the planets land formations, weather patterns, minerals, and ice.

Mars has been a longtime subject of fascination for authors such as Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Robert A. Heinlein. All wrote books about Mars, many featuring Martians invading Earth. Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) is about an orphaned Earthling raised by peaceful Martians who has now returned to earth to transform society. H.G. Wells's story The War of the Worlds (1898) is about a Martian invasion of Earth.

Zelda Fitzgerald, (books by this author) born Zelda Sayre, died on this day in 1948. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1900, her tumultuous marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald came to symbolize the Jazz Age of the 1920s. A writer, painter, and dancer herself, her creative endeavors were overshadowed by those of her husband; Scott relied on her heavily to provide inspiration and a "voice" for his female characters, so much so that she once said, "Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."

A breakdown in 1930 led to a series of hospitalizations, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She moved in and out of a number of institutions, eventually ending up at Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. On the day she died, a fire broke out in the hospital's kitchen. Locked in a room awaiting electric shock therapy, Zelda had no chance as the fire spread through the dumbwaiter shaft and wooden fire escapes. She and eight other women died, and she was buried next to Scott, who had died eight years earlier, in the family plot in Rockville, Maryland. On their shared tombstone is inscribed the last line from The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Zelda once wrote, "Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."

A woman known as "Moses" died on this day in 1913. Harriet Tubman was born to slave parents Benjamin Ross and Harriet Green, in Dorchester County, Maryland. The exact year of her birth is uncertain, but it was probably around 1820. She was christened Araminta by her parents, and soon became known as "Minty," though she eventually renamed herself Harriet after her mother. When she was about five or six, the slave-owner hired her out as a child-minder. She was whipped if the baby cried and woke its mother, and one day she received five whippings before breakfast.

When the 15-year-old Harriet refused one day to help an overseer restrain a runaway slave, she was hit in the head with a two-pound weight and was left unconscious without medical care for two days. Although she recovered, she began suffering from seizures, and narcolepsy, and also began to have visions and prophetic dreams. Deeply religious, she viewed these as messages from God.

Harriet escaped, when the plantation owner died in 1849, and she made it to Philadelphia and enjoyed a brief period as a free woman, until passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 made her a runaway slave once again. The thought of her family left behind in Maryland haunted her, and she worked odd jobs and saved her money, so that a year later, she might return to help her niece's family escape.

Over 10 years and at least 13 trips, Harriet Tubman is believed to have led some 300 souls out of slavery into freedom in Canada. On one of her last trips, she brought out her parents, who were by that time around 70 years old. At one point, the price on her head was as high as $40,000, but she was never betrayed. She was never captured and neither were the slaves she led. Years later, she told an audience, "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say — I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger."

Today is the birthday of James Herriot, (books by this author) born James Alfred Wight, in 1916. Born in Sunderland, England, his family moved to Glasgow, Scotland, when he was still an infant. He became a veterinarian and moved to the Yorkshire Dales, and in 1966 at the age of 50 he began a series of much-beloved books loosely based on the people and animals he had known there. He took the title of the first book, All Creatures Great and Small, from a 19th-century Anglican hymn.

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

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