At the Sunny Ridge Retirement Center by Peg Bresnahan/POEM - Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, Saturday, August 6, 2016

Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, August 6, 2016. Saturday:

At the Sunny Ridge Retirement Center

by Peg Bresnahan

During Harriet’s memorial service,
Frances leaned, put her head
on my shoulder and died—quietly

as if she didn’t want to interrupt
Harriet’s program.
The minister didn’t see us,

no one knew except me. At the piano,
Mary played the introduction
to Going Home. Everyone thumbed

their hymnals for page two hundred forty-three.
I didn’t know what to do, since Frances
still looked like Frances, only not quite

and she was ninety-five. I put my arm
around her so she wouldn’t fall
and waited for someone to notice.

Through the French doors
finches squabbled at the bird feeder.
The squirrel we call Rocky

contemplated his next move.
A laundry truck rolled by.
I looked down at Frances’ navy blue crocs,

the ones she claimed felt so much
like bedroom slippers
she could wear them anywhere.

“At the Sunny Ridge Retirement Center” by Peg Bresnahan from In a Country None of Us Called Home. © Press 53, 2014. Reprinted with permission.

Joyce's Epiphany "The Dead" from Dubliners WOW!!. Beautiful

From The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, for Monday Jan. 6, 2014:


Joyce's Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, "The Dead," and that story ends: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

XMas: Keillor, Dickens, Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Dylan Thomas-Celebrate

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor December 25, 2013:

Today is Christmas Day, and we're celebrating with quotes and literature about the holiday.

Charles Dickens (books by this author) described the holidays as "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Sir Walter Scott (books by this author) wrote:
"Twas Christmas broach'd the mightiest ale;
Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;
A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year."

It was 19th-century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (books by this author) who wrote: "I heard the bells, on Christmas Day, Their old, familiar carols play, And wild and sweet /The words repeat /Of peace on earth, good will to men."

In "A Child's Christmas in Wales" (1952), the poetDylan Thomas (books by this author) wrote: "Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: 'It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.' 'But that was not the same snow,' I say. 'Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely white-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.'"

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

XMAS Eve 1923 & 1906=1st Natl. Xmas Tree & 1st Radio Broadcast Program (Electric Lights)

The Writer's Almanac for December 24, 2013 with GARRISON KEILLOR:

At 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve in 1923, President Calvin Coolidge lit the first national Christmas tree outside the White House in the area known as the Ellipse. The tree was a 48-foot balsam fir, a gift from the president of Middlebury College in Coolidge's home state of Vermont. Unfortunately, the bottom 10-foot section of the tree was damaged during shipping, so branches from another tree were tied on in place of those that had been broken. The tree was lit with more than 2,500 electric lights in red, white, and green, which Coolidge lit by pressing a button at the base of the tree. The use of electric lights on Christmas trees was still a new phenomenon, as was electricity in general — Coolidge's hometown of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, still didn't have electricity. A partner of Thomas Edison had first put electric lights on his home Christmas tree in 1882, but it took a long time for the public to trust the idea, especially since the lights themselves were expensive and you had to hire an electrician to rig them up.

On Christmas Eve, about 6,000 people gathered to watch the tree-lighting ceremony. There were musical performances by the U.S. Marine Band and the Epiphany Church choir. After the ceremony, the First Congregational Church choir was scheduled to sing Christmas carols, and first lady Grace Coolidge had invited the public to come sing along on the White House grounds. Music and lyrics for the carols had been published in The Evening Star so that people could clip them out and take them along, and they were encouraged to carry a flashlight as well. At midnight, after the official festivities had wound down, the city's African-American community was allowed to view the tree, and they held a 40-minute ceremony.

The media — excited about the national tree — had been following the Coolidge family's every move for several weeks, reporting in-depth on their shopping trips. For Christmas, Coolidge gave his wife 25 one-dollar gold pieces. But he forgot to buy a card, so he reused one that he had received from a friend a few days earlier, which unfortunately still had the original guy's name on it.

On Christmas Eve in 1906, the first radio program was broadcast. Canadian-born Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden sent his signals from the 420-foot radio tower of the National Electric Signaling Company, at Brant Rock on the Massachusetts seacoast. Fessenden opened the program by playing "O Holy Night" on the violin. Later he recited verses from the Gospel of St. Luke, then broadcast a gramophone version of Handel's "Largo." His signal was received up to five miles away.

Thomas Hardy Had Two Funerals Simultaneously

Thanks to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

Today is the birthday of the man who said, "The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things." English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (books by this author) was born on this day in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, in 1840. He often helped his father with various building projects, and when he was 16, he took a job as an architect's apprentice. He moved to London when he was 22, to take a job with another architect, and he delighted in the city's literary and cultural environment. He began writing fiction and poetry; his first published story was "How I Built Myself a House" (1865), and he also wrote a novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1867), which was never published.

He set many of his novels and poems in "Wessex," reviving the old Anglo-Saxon name for the counties of southwestern England, where he grew up. The Wessex he wrote of, though, was part real place, part literary conceit; he always insisted, "This is an imaginative Wessex only."

His first commercial and critical success was Far From the Madding Crowd (1874); it did so well that he was able to quit architecture and write full time. He produced six novels in the 1880s, and seven in the 1890s; two of these — Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) — caused so much scandal that he eventually gave up on novels forever. He wrote a few plays, but in the end he returned to his first love — poetry — which he regarded as a purer art form anyway. He produced eight collections before his death in 1928. He had two funerals simultaneously: His cremated remains were buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, while at the same time, his heart was buried in Dorchester, in his beloved Wessex.

From his poem "Wessex Heights" (1896):

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

Mark Twain's Birth And Death Arrive With Halley's Comet Visits, 75 Years Apart

Garrison Keillor, Writer's Almanac April 21, 2013:




In 1909, Mark Twain is reported to have said: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it. ... The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'" And he was true to his word: Mark Twain died on this day in 1910, a day after the comet's closest approach to Earth (books by this author).
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. After his father died and left the family in financial straits, he went to work as a printer's apprentice at the Hannibal Gazette, and it was there he discovered he liked to write.
He was a travel writer, a master of humor and satire, an ardent abolitionist, an inventor, a publisher, and a popular public speaker, but he wasn't a good money manager, and though he made a lot of money at his writing, he lost it all through bad investments and declared bankruptcy in 1893. He began a lecture tour the following year and earned the money to pay back the money he owed his creditors.
William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature," and Hemingway said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, called Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Huck Finn is also the fourth most banned book in America, and has recently come to public notice again with the publication of a new version that replaces the controversial racial epithets with the word "slave."

The World Is Not Conclusion / Emily Dickinson (Happy Birthday Today Belle of Amherst!)

This World Is Not Conclusion by Emily Dickinson this world is not conclusion a species stands beyond - invisible, as music - but positive as sound - it beckons, and it baffles philosophy - don't know - and through a riddle, at the last - sagacity must go - to guess it, puzzles scholars - to gain it, men have borne contempt of generations and crucifixion, shown - faith slips - and laughs, and rallies - blushes, if any see - plucks at a twig of evidence - and asks a vane, the way - much gesture, from the pulpit - strong hallelujahs roll - narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul - "This World Is Not Conclusion" by Emily Dickinson. Public domain. (buy now) Today is the birthday of "the Belle of Amherst": Emily Dickinson (books by this author), born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on this date (1830). She spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom in her father's house. The room contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. Her favorite author was Shakespeare. She eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems. In the year 1862 alone, she wrote 366 poems — about one per day. Most people think of Emily Dickinson as a slightly odd recluse, but she was in fact very outgoing in her younger years. As she became more passionate about writing poetry, she went out less and devoted her life to her verses. Over the years, scholars have come up with a lot of theories for her growing reclusiveness. Some believe it was because she was nursing a mysteriously broken heart, others think she was a closeted lesbian, and still others think she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder. One biographer speculates that she may have suffered from epilepsy. Emily Dickinson said: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." Thanks to Garrison Keillor at Writer's Almanac