So, once there was a little girl named Trudy. She lived maybe forty miles from here - I could look it up, I suppose, but let's say that she lived over in Richmond, up Highway 13 from Lexington, Missouri. It happens that when Trudy was five-or-so years old, an older brother came to live with her family. Adopted, because the boy's mother had died and his father was unable to look after his son and daughters. He gave them up, poor fellow, up 'round Chicago, I think. James Wolfe was his name, but what was his story? Don't know. His wife's name? Don't know, but I know that they named their red-headed, blue-eyed son Albert Harley Wolfe, b. 23 Feb, 1891, in Flora Co. Illinois. His little sister Emma (b. 17 Dec. 1895), was sent west on an orphan train. Marshall & Nellie Stickney of Lewiston, Minnesota (down 'round Winona), adopted Emma, changed her name to Alice and raised her as their own. Alice Stickney went to the 1st Pres. church, played the organ there...

Harley, a carpenter, and Emma, aka Alice, had other sisters (Elizabeth? Dorothy?), their whereabouts unknown to me, but I know for sure that 9-year-old Harley grew up to serve overseas in the American Expeditionary Forces (WWI) and after a lot of other things happened, he was my mom's dad. AND Grandpa's kid sister, Trudy (Gertrude Brandt) would be 115 today, being as she was born 14 Jan, 1896, on the anniversary of the birth of Gen. Benedict Arnold, can't help adding, but whatcha gonna do?

Winter Evening

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” Jack London

So, according to Wikipedia, which I'd not be using other than a starting point, were I to be working on a book - I AM, as a matter of record, working on a book, but it's fiction therefore and I've been stuck on the same chapter these last four days ..Frozen in one spot, as it were. 12 º outdoors at this writing - have I written here how grateful I am to be living in a time & place & w/ the means to have 1. a furnace and 2. a water heater among many another blessing. = what happens next when anything can happen, that's the question..What would Jack London [b. this day in 1876] say? "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." Where was I? Ah- according to the wikibots, today marks the 154th anniversary of the birth of - oh baybee what a painter, John Singer Sargent. On JSS' 20th birthday, Mr. & Mrs. Cheney of San Francisco welcomed their new boy baby into the world, no way of knowing he'd live hard, die young [in 1916], & be ever remembered as said Jack London. So, yup, it's Tex Ritter's birthday and John Hancock's, according to the Old Calendar anyway and that of statesman/orator Edmund Burke. But none of this remembering moves my novel one word further along. None of it changes the fact that folks have been weeping & waiting around in Tuscon for memorial services, they've been standing vigil, setting out candles and flowers and notes, all because a troubled soul set out one morning, determined to kill a diligent, earnest, & charming public servant and hurt &/or kill as many strangers, as he could. Among those to be pitied, pity the parents whose boy baby grew up to be that young man in an Arizona jail cell, siting there with that smirky face hiding a fearsome jungle within.

I think it was John Irving who wrote something like 'we must do good not in spite of the world's sorrow & senseless cruelty, but because of it, if only to balance things out.' So paint something lovely, do something kind, fix a good meal, write someone a letter. Shovel a walk. I'll go do that and determine not to feed the raw, unschooled part of my sensibilities, my monkey brain; it tends to want the killer dispatched, his ticket punched, his neck stretched & never mind the legal niceties.

Winter Morning

‎"I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone..." Alice Paul, legal scholar, valiant suffragist, jailed and tortured b. 11 January. 1885.... at this link, you'll find a splendid image of Ms. Paul.

So, yesterday, I never got around to writing, not one little word, here anyway, but I did note on my Facebook profile [for what it's worth] that the 10th of January marked the anniversaries of the births of Mrs. Wilder's charismatic, fiddle-playing, wander-lusting dad, in 1836, in, I think, Cuba, New York; and of her enigmatic, patient, older sister, in 1865, blond, blue-eyed Mary. I didn't even note that it was late on the 10th of January, 1980, over in West Germany, that my brother Paul was thrown out of a car, going too fast on a road too icy, driven by Paul's friend, who'd had too much to drink as had Paul, who was passed out, a PERFECT condition to be in if you're going to be thrown into a tree & into the next world. Had this not happened, he'd be 52 yr. old now. So. There it was; there it is.

No, yesterday I fussed with the 3rd or 4th revision of a twice & properly rejected fictitious story - a day well spent? pretty much. Then I set the story aside, seeing as I had company coming [Bill & Brenda, two doors up, to join me in assembling a jigsaw puzzle, of one of the images created by one of the best illustrators ever, Jessie Willcox Smith] to stir up a batch of SCOTCH GRAHAM ROLLS from a recipe I got from Natalie Kinsey-Warnock of northeastern Vermont, who got it from her foremothers. Here 'tis: Heat up your oven to 400º. Get out your muffin tin w/ the 12 little cups in it. Butter/oil/spray-lube/or otherwise grease them. MIX together

2 cups of milk

2 cups of whole wheat flour

[I substituted 1/3 cup of that w.w.flour w/uncooked oatmeal]

2 cups of white flour

1 cup of brown sugar

2/3 cup of melted shortening

1 tsp. of baking soda

1/2 tsp. of salt • It seems to me I baked them about 12-15 min. You're going for nice & puffy. Very good on a winter morning with butter or as I had them with Natalie, warm applesauce, made by her mother, Louise, just down the road.

“Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.” ...

Jennie Jerome Churchill, b. 9 Jan. 1854, the year of Kansas/Nebraska, dreadful war in the Crimea, the year in which Henry David Thoreau published Walden...

"There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman." Carrie Chapman Catt, b. 9 Jan. 1859, the year in which Chas. Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities [oh baybee, do read it if you haven't] & John Brown & his followers raided the federal arsenal @ Harper's Ferry, VA.

Two very different ladies, but I'd be willing to bet that the suffrage reformer would agree w/ the Brooklyn-born beauty, Jennie Jerome: “It is so tempting to try the most difficult thing possible.” One had to pry women's right to vote from the clenched fist of the U.S. government. The other had to put up w/ Lord Churchill.

Beans

"Praying is like a rocking chair - it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere." Louise Hovick, a.k.a. Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970)

So, I reckon Mrs. Presley of Mississippi used to do as many another old-timey cook have done on winter mornings: measure out a cup or two dried beans and set them to soak for cooking later on. My mom & her mom & so on. I did the same, earlier today, and cooked 'em up in a broth with some chicken, cabbage, onion, & garlic, sage & thyme. Tossed in some frozen spinach too, for the color & nutrition and to offset all the Girl Scout cookies I put away today. I mention Mrs. P., of course, because her boy would have turned 76 years old today. A big day it is for anniversary & commemoration. According to the wiki-bots, it was on this day in 1790 that the 1st President delivered the 1st S. of the U. Address. The Battle of New Orleans, 1815 - and boy oh boy, let me point out 1. how much I'd love to write & illus. a book about that and 2. how much my 8-year-old self adored Johnny Horton's hit song, written by folksinger/educator Jimmy Driftwood. Fifteen years after the British were defeated by Old Hickory & the Pirate & their hard-bitten men, the glorious painter Albert Bierstadt was born in Germany. The 100th birthday of a tough resilient entertainer, Gypsy Rose Lee - a great story there was about her on NPR this morning, God bless it & let it be funded forever. There's something deep-down satisfying about puttering about the kitchen, chopping onion for a pot of beans and listening to the radio.

"Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes, then fire low." so said Israel Putnam or, perhaps Colonel Wm. Prescott, to their exhausted, exhilarated troops on the morning of 17 June, 1775, Breed's Hill. General Putnam was 67 years old, seeing as he was born on the 5th of January, 1718. I'm thinking that New Orleans was founded that year. Benjamin Franklin was a 12-yr-old Boston boy... The old general had been mouldering in his grave, strolling the golden streets of the Blue Beyond for ten earthly years when Millard Fillmore was born in New York State, w/ no earthly idea that he'd become the 13th President of the United States and how would that happen? Because of his years spent pursuing law & politics + whatever was going on in the milk and cherries, consumed by 'Old Rough & Ready-or-not-you're-dead' Zachary Taylor, President No. 12, in July 1850. And, and, and proud, strong, baby-voiced, Miss Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen was born 100 years ago today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkUDjcXqyow

Many a soul came into and departed the world's stage, this vale of tears & wonder, through the door in the veil marked January 7. The fact remains that those about whom I've written had their time and never would have been remembered if they'd spent their earthly time pondering trivia. They got about their business, doing things worth remembering. So enough of this for now. I've conjured some characters and their story awaits the telling.

Epiphany

So, I'd pretty much decided to quit this blogification. Hardly anyone reads this hoohah and why would they? How could they, when there are so many books, so much verbiage posted? Do I read all that I should and would like to? Nope. And wasn't I taking time away from writing words that might, just might be published? For which I might be paid? And I certainly wasn't taking the time to write here at any length, to write about what's really on my mind. My solitary ways. Shame for my past. Fear of the future, now that the market for the kinds of books I've written and illustrated these past 25 years has dwindled. I've taken part in many a late night conversation with other authors, wondering how they're going to manage.

I guess we'll find out. I reckon the graveyards are full of folks who wondered the same thing. Their bones moulder alongside those of folks who might have had more gumption and more luck. In any case, it's the 6th of January. Loretta Young's birthday, so a collection of her old films are flickering on the video hearth today. THough it matters not one little bit nowadays, some might remember that she and Clark Gable kindled a child together back in the day. The Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran came into the world on 6 Jan 1883 and, according to tradition, the Maid of Orleans was born 399 years ago today. So there: a bit of trivia. Why is that of any interest? I don't know that it is except for the pondering. Maybe it was on a clear cold day like today upon which this or that child was born, some significant life began. I rather like beginnings. It's endings that leave me flummoxed so I rush into them, meet them more than halfway. There's another beginning around the corner.

“The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to...The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.... Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by."

These and many thousands more wonderful words were written by Carl Sandburg who was born on this day, Epiphany, the 6th of January in 1878, which would have been George & Martha Washington's 119th wedding anniversary, had they lived. as a matter of fact, Geo. H. W. Bush married Barbara Pierce on this day in 1945. I wish that their eldest had not gotten into politics, but that's just me.

In answer to a letter to a writer friend earlier today: Why are we in the writing biz, such as it is:

• Because when it's going well, it's pretty satisfactory fun. Even when it's not, one can work out a fine little life in the margins.

• The people we get to meet & know, such as nearly all of the school librarians I've met over the years. Other authors.

• Sometimes we make money.

• The things we learn. Being able to tell about them, if not as much as we'd like.

• Finding out how we think & feel about things.

• To share our points of view, mine being that there pretty goddam interesting people well worth the knowing and that in the knowing, we'll be heartened. I have been anyway.

• The places we get to go, such as, well, the first place that comes to mind is Susan B. Anthony's house in Rochester, NY. and the White House, for that matter. It occurred to me then and now that when the occupants went out the door to talk to people, they may well have felt that it wouldn't do any good, wouldn't change anything, but they went anyway.

• Total strangers read what we write. One can hope.

• Being part of our civilization's conversation, the borderless, timeless nation of wordsmiths, writers of letters, manifestoes, tales, drivel, & explanations.

• To justify our lust for office supplies.

Reason enough, I reckon.