Signs
by Luci Shaw

In time of drought, let us be
thankful for this very gentle rain,

a gift not to be disdained
though it is little and brief,

reaching no great depth, barely
kissing the leaves' lips. Think of it as

mercy. Other minor blessings may
show up—tweezers for splinters,

change for the parking meter,
a green light at the intersection,

a cool wind that lifts away summer's
suffocating heat. An apology after

a harsh comment. A word that opens
an unfinished poem like a key in a lock.

“Signs” by Luci Shaw from Eye of the Beholder. Paraclete Press © 2018. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is Earth Day. It was first observed in 1970, but its roots go back to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's (books by this author) landmark book, Silent Spring, exposing the effects of pesticides and other chemical pollution on the environment.

During the late 1960s, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson had the idea to harness the energy and methods of the student protests against the Vietnam War to organize a grassroots conservation movement. At a press conference in 1969, he announced plans for a nationwide demonstration, to take place the following spring. Twenty million people nationwide participated in the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and the government finally took notice, forming the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts.

In 1990, on the 20th anniversary, organizer Denis Hayes took Earth Day to the international arena, and coordinated events in 141 countries worldwide, boosting the awareness and practice of recycling. The year 2000 marked the first time the event was coordinated on the Internet, and the message was the need for clean energy to counteract climate change.

According to the Earth Day Network, Earth Day is celebrated by a billion people, making it the world's largest secular holiday.

Today is the birthday of the man who once wrote, "Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea," novelist and dramatist Henry Fielding (books by this author), born to the gentry in Somerset, England, in 1707. He began his career writing for the stage, but often found himself in hot water because his plays were invariably political satires, to which the government didn't take kindly. In 1737, probably in response to Fielding's plays, Parliament passed the Theatrical Licensing Act, which required plays to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain; Fielding, knowing that none of his plays were likely to gain approval, retired from the stage and became a novelist.

He's best known for The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), which recounts the adventures of a lusty but good-hearted young man who falls in love with his neighbor's daughter. On its surface a comic romance, Tom Jones also contains a fair measure of social commentary on the English class system.

Fielding was also appointed Chief Magistrate of London in 1750, and with his younger half-brother, John, he founded the Bow Street Runners, London's first professional police force. 

It's the birthday of legendary jazz bassist, bandleader, and composer Charles Mingus, sometimes known as "The Angry Man of Jazz," born in Nogales, Arizona, in 1922. Raised in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, his earliest musical influences were the gospel choirs he heard in church, and Duke Ellington on the radio. He was classically trained on the double bass, but found his home in jazz, and in the 1940s toured with Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton.

In the early 1950s, he settled in New York and worked with Billy Taylor, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Art Tatum, and Bud Powell. He also performed with Charlie Parker, who radically transformed Mingus's perceptions of jazz. He began to focus more heavily on composition in the middle of the decade, and borrowed elements from bebop, rhythm and blues, classical, and gospel music to create a style that strongly resisted a label. In his 40-year career, he recorded more than 60 albums, including Wonderland (1959) and Tijuana Moods (1962).

He was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, in the mid-1970s, and though the disease affected his ability to play the bass, he still composed by humming into a tape recorder. He died in 1979, and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River. After his death, an archivist discovered a complex and remarkably difficult composition, numbering more than 4,000 measures, called "Epitaph." A portion of the jazz symphony had been performed by Mingus and a 31-piece band in 1962, but the musicians weren't up to such a challenging composition, and Mingus put the full two-and-a-half-hour score in the closet, never to revisit it in his lifetime. The entire 500-page score was organized and assembled, and in 1989 it premiered at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, 10 years after Mingus's death.

He wrote: "Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!"

Today is the birthday of poet Louise Glück (books by this author), born in New York City in 1943. She grew up on Long Island, and her father, a Hungarian immigrant, helped invent the X-Acto knife. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, and her first book of poems, called Firstborn, was published in 1968. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles (1985), the Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Wild Iris (1992), and was named U.S. poet laureate in 2003.

She tends to write poems that operate, as she puts it, "on a vertical axis of transcendence and grief." She has a word of wisdom for young poets: It never gets easier to write. In the Yale Daily News, she said, "The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there's no struggle, there's no torment, there's no sense that the thing you've embarked on is a catastrophe."

It's the birthday of writer Paula Fox (books by this author), born in New York City (1923). Her parents were charming and beautiful and had no interest in being parents. Her mother, Elsie, was a Cuban-born socialite; her father was a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter and a serious alcoholic. They loved drinking and going to parties. A few days after Paula was born, they abandoned her at an orphanage in Manhattan. Her Cuban grandmother was visiting the country for a few months, and she rescued her granddaughter from the orphanage, but she was old and senile, and so the girl was passed from one set of people to the next, many of them strangers. For a time, she was fostered by a clergyman in upstate New York, a kind man who read books with her and treated her like a real daughter. But a few years later, her parents reappeared and demanded her back, then changed their minds, and she spent time with various caregivers in Florida, Cuba, New York, and New Hampshire.

She only attended high school for a few months, and she got married when she was 17, and divorced soon after. She gave birth to a daughter when she was 20, but gave her up for adoption. She spent time in Europe and New York, and was married and divorced a second time. She wrote stories here and there.

Then, in the 1960s, she started writing incessantly, books for children and adults, and she published 15 books in 10 years, including Desperate Characters (1970) and The Widow's Children (1976), for adults, and The Slave Dancer (1974), for children. But her books for adults fell out of favor. The Widow's Children was rejected by 13 publishers before it was finally accepted, and by the early 1990s, all her books for adults were out of print.

That was about the time that the novelist Jonathan Franzen was staying at a writers' colony in upstate New York, working on his second novel. He picked up a copy of Desperate Characters and fell in love. Then he published a famous essay in Harper's called "Perchance to Dream," about the doomed state of American novels. One exception, in his mind, was Desperate Characters. He wrote: "That a book like Desperate Characters had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in a novel pulled almost at random from a bookshelf — felt akin to an instance of religious grace." The writer Tom Bissell was an editorial assistant at W.W. Norton, and he read Franzen's essay and looked up Desperate Characters, and he was surprised to find it out of print. He got his hands on a copy and loved it as well, and he convinced Norton to publish Desperate Characters as a paperback reprint, and then all her other books that had fallen out of print.

Fox published more than 30 books, including Monkey Island (1991); Borrowed Finery (2001), a memoir of her childhood; and News from the World (2011). She died at age 93 in Brooklyn, New York in 2017.

She said, "A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one."

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

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