Prayer
by Marie Howe

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.


“Prayer” from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe. Copyright © 2008 by Marie Howe. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. (buy now)

On this date in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Banking Relief Act, kicking off 100 days of New Deal legislation.

Roosevelt had only been in office for five days. The country was in the grip of the Great Depression, and the banking system was on the verge of collapse as people rushed to withdraw their savings. Banks were closed in all 48 states. As soon as he took office, FDR called Congress into a special session that would last for three months. He declared a four-day “bank holiday” that shut down all banks and even the Federal Reserve while Congress worked on legislation. The Emergency Banking Act was introduced in the House first, and representatives were in such a hurry to pass it that they didn’t wait for their own individual copies, but rather listened as the single copy was read aloud, and voted on it immediately. In Roosevelt’s first radio Fireside Chat on March 12, 1933, he said:

“The new law allows the 12 Federal Reserve Banks to issue additional currency on good assets and thus the banks that reopen will be able to meet every legitimate call. The new currency is being sent out by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to every part of the country.”

The government hoped that these assurances would be enough to lure people — and their money — back to the beleaguered banks.

When the banks began opening up again the next morning, people lined up to bring their money back, and by the end of March about two-thirds of the money that had been taken out of the nation’s banks had been redeposited. Wall Street took note and the stock market began to rebound. The Emergency Banking Act was designed to be only a temporary measure. Later that year Congress passed the 1933 Banking Act, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, which still guarantees deposits against bank failure.

It was on this day in 1796 that Napoleon Bonaparte, the future emperor of France, married Josephine de Beauharnais, an older widow with two children. The marriage scandalized Bonaparte’s family, but he was undeterred in his passion. He called Josephine, “worse than beautiful.” He once wrote to her, “I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.” Josephine’s given name was Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie and she was known as “Rose.” Napoleon Bonaparte, however, preferred “Josephine,” and that’s how she was known from the moment they met.

Napoleon was two hours late for the wedding. They’d been engaged for just two official weeks before marrying. In the marriage contract, she made herself four years younger and he added 18 months to his age to make himself 26. He was scruffy, skinny, unkempt, jealous, and once declared, “Power is my mistress.” Josephine was described as sexy, with a low voice and a “lionine walk.” On their wedding day, he gave her a gold medallion with the inscription, “To Destiny.” Two days after the wedding ceremony, Bonaparte left to lead the French army in Italy.

It's the birthday of writer Vita Sackville-West (books by this author), born near Sevenoaks, England (1892). She started writing poetry at an early age, and by the time she was 18 she had written eight novels and several plays, some of them in French or Italian. She was beautiful, more than six feet tall, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes. She fell in love with several women, some of them her classmates. When she was 21 she married a diplomat, Harold Nicholson, even while she was in a passionate affair with another woman. She said of Nicholson, "Our relationship was so fresh, so intellectual, so unphysical, that I never thought of him in that aspect at all [...] Some men seem to be born to be lovers, others to be husbands; he belongs to the latter category." For his part, Nicholson had his own share of lovers. Despite their unconventional marriage, Sackville-West and Nicholson remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, writing each other daily when they were apart, and raising a son together.

In December of 1922, when Sackville-West was 30 years old, she met Virginia Woolf at a dinner party. Eventually, they became friends, and then lovers. Sackville-West was the inspiration for the main character in Woolf's novel Orlando (1928). In 1927, busily working on her novel and jealous of Sackville-West's affair with a woman named Mary Campbell, Woolf wrote her a letter:

"Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people ... Shall you mind?"

Although she is best remembered as the inspiration for Orlando, Sackville-West was a successful writer in her own right. She wrote more than 15 novels and 10 books of poetry, including The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931). For the last 15 years of her life, she contributed a weekly gardening column called "In Your Garden" to the Observer. She wrote the columns just to make money, and even called them "beastly," but they are considered classics of garden writing and still widely read today.

Her father was a baron and she grew up at the family estate, the Calendar House, a Tudor mansion in Kent with a long history. The Archbishop of Canterbury had lived there until King Henry VIII took it away because he wanted it for himself. The Calendar House has 365 rooms, one for each day of the year.

She wrote, "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?"

It’s the birthday of technology writer David Pogue (books by this author), born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 1963, one of the best-selling “how-to-guide” authors ever. He’s written several books in the “For Dummies” series, including the first guide to Mac computers and guides to opera and classical music and magic. His novel Hard Drive was a New York Times “notable book of the year.” Though he’s best known for his commentary on technology, he is also a music and theater geek who spent 10 years conducting and arranging Broadway musicals in New York. Demand for composers was slightly less urgent than demand for computer experts, however, and he made his first foray into technology by teaching Broadway folks like Stephen Sondheim how to use their Macs. In between his numerous regular print and television appearances, he finds time to write song spoofs, cartoons, and various animations, which he publishes on his website. He has also hosted a NOVA miniseries on PBS called Making Stuff, which explored the materials that will shape our future.

It’s the birthday of a writer who called his books “the chewing gum of American literature.” That’s crime novelist Mickey Spillane (books by this author), born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn (1918). His Irish father was a bartender, and Spillane grew up in a tough neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He worked odd jobs, including as a lifeguard, circus performer, and salesman. He was selling ties at a department store when he met a coworker whose brother produced comic books, and he was convinced to try writing some himself. Spillane worked writing comic prose for a year, then left to join up with the Army Air Forces after Pearl Harbor. After the war he returned to comics. He said, “I wanted to get away from the flying heroes and I had the prototype cop,” so he invented a private eye hero named Mike Danger. Danger was a flop, so Spillane renamed him Mike Hammer and wrote a novel instead.

I, the Jury (1947) took him just three weeks to write, and it was an instant hit. He turned out more than 30 novels, most of them featuring Mike Hammer, including Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), The Girl Hunters (1962), Body Lovers (1967), and The Killing Man (1989). His novels were incredibly violent, usually ending with Hammer executing people. The critics panned Spillane, but he didn’t care. He said, “Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.” He said he never had a character who drank cognac or had a mustache, because he didn’t know how to spell those words. He said: “I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.” Spillane was incredibly popular — his books have sold more than 225 million copies.

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

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