Summer of '74

Someday he'd be known as the "Mad Monk." Someday he'd help to bring down the Romanovs, but in 1874, Grigori Rasputin was a 5-year-old peasant boy out in Siberia. Theo. Roosevelt, future President, was 16, an avid amateur taxidermist. Ex-president Millard Fillmore kicked the bucket that year, the year Laura Ingalls turned seven. Sam'l Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was working on a ms. , "the Adventures of Tom Sawyer," and a group of genteel renegades were experimenting with the painting of light, light spilling out of the heavens onto haystacks or the facades of churches or gatherings of Parisians. The light of a sunrise, light and shadow dappling water and the French countryside.

It was in the summer of that year that an elephant was sent out to stroll from Missouri over to Illinois. Folks figured that if James Eads' remarkable new bridge could manage an elephant, then it ought to be safe enough carry a multitude of trains over the Mississippi River and so it has, all these years.

There was a White House wedding that year: President Grant, who'd weathered warfare at its most gruesome, wept as his only daughter got married in May. Nellie Grant would have cried too, had she known what a bum she was marrying, but ah well. Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Shackleton were newborns that year. So was Guglielmo Marconi and before the year was over, the beautiful Jennie Jerome Churchill would give birth to the future Prime Minister of England.

Here now I've taken the scenic route to get to what I thought was well worth noting: baby Herbert Hoover was born on this day, the 10th of August, in 1874. Years ago when I was working on my presidential book Ghosts of the White House, I'd studied a bit about all of the gents who'd lived within those stone walls - or, in the case of Geo. Washington, merely visited, on the 14th of March, 1797, I believe. What a remarkable fellow Hoover was, I thought at the time, I think when I'd come across a photo of him as a young man, hale and blond and brilliant. uff da!

"He was," I wrote in Gs of the W.H., "a rich mining engineer who, during the First World War, organized a campaign to get food to [starving, wretched] people behind enemy lines. How could a brilliant, big-hearted hero like Herbert Hoover seem so helpless?" So "gloomy and uncertain." Sigh. I discovered later on, much, much later on that old Herbert Hoover was here in town, on the day I turned six years old. Harry Truman, who'd befriended HH, invited him here to Independence. All I knew was that I'd gotten the Tiny Tears doll I'd very much wanted for a birthday present. Ah well.

"Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned."

Izaak Walton, born August 9, 1593

Oh, August, how you call to mind an old friend whose birthday's today, my folks' wedding anniversary, my grandmother's birthday [same as Napoleon Bonaparte's]; state fairs (sawdust, corn dogs, sweat, the brown eyes of cows, and orange pop). Getting ready for one of my weddings, back when Nixon was in office (sewing a gown out of white cotton from the Ben Franklin Store, 59¢ a yard). It was the 9th of August - 36 years ago? Can it be? - that Nixon resigned his job, his resentments catching up with him at last.

Going through catalogues, planning back-to-school wardrobes, knowing that only kids from rich families could have all they wanted and the only people who had money and children were the Kennedys. My 11-year-old self planned an entire house, its furnishings and major appliances, all for my imaginary family, my husband and our three children. Took me a while, too long of a while to realize that the wealthy were not likely to do their shopping out of catalogues from Sears and 'Monkey' Wards.

Dreading, anticipating a new school year when all would be better. This year I'd have friends. I'd understand math. Now it's This year I'll finish that manuscript. I'll, by god, knock off this squashy business around my middle. Soon it will be cool again - of that, at least, I am certain.

So, it's the last day of the first week of the 8th month, 219th day of the year . ... man oh man how calendar obsessive am I on a summer Saturday morning. Just getting my bearings. Does it in any way matter that Billie Burke, Mata Hari, and Garrison Keillor share this as a birthday? No. That on 7 Aug 1942, the horrific Battle of Guadalcanal began? Only in that in the remembering we honor the sacrifices, acknowledge the sufferings on the way to the cosmic catharsis three years off in the future.. On the 7th of August, A.D. 79, I reckon that Pompeiians and Herculaneumistas were going about their business, preparing and eating their meals, pondering their futures. No way to know what's around the corner. It's a curious time of year, summer past its zenith. September, time of new beginnings, lurking around the corner.

Surprise!

"Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck."

Guy de Maupassant, wondrous writer, born this day in the summer of 1850. The lilies were in bloom.

So, I was startled, a bit, day before yesterday, by the sight of green stems topped with a froth of pink trumpets. Clutches of wands, lilies conjured from their tips, sprung up sometime in the night here lately, along fence rows, amongst the peonies. They come up every year about this time, letting you know that summer's on the downhill, that the season's gonna end. So these late summer lilies hadn't oughtn't to surprise anybody, but so they do. Nothing one day but crisp, hot grass, everything green looking a little tired - could I be projecting? - then one morning - lilies!

So. I read once the reason why this hot and miserable time of year is called the 'dog days,' and I might wax on a bit about that if I called that reason to mind, but I can't and anyway, wax would melt on such a day as this. Eggs will fry on sidewalks. Dogs and small children, left in cars by the criminally forgetful, stupid, cruel &/or heedless will die. When I walk downstairs it's as if I'm descending into cool - water? cloud? Let me merely say that it's cooler downstairs and dreadfully warm outdoors because it is August - but is it warmer for deeper, systemic reasons? A question worth the pondering, but not here, not by me, not just now. I always find myself thinking of summers in the city, the sufferings in the brick bake ovens fitted out w/in as apartments. Of hot horses and mules, heads down, sides heaving, plodding down sun-baked roads. Of workers, having no choice but to slave away in fields of hay or cotton or tobacco, or quarries w/ broiling sun glaring off white stone. Women in limp dresses gone dark with sweat, damp hair pulled up & away from red, streaming faces, working away in a hot kitchen made hotter by the stove because there's canning to be done, cooking to be done, washing to be done. How lovely those old photographs look, of folks out on their porches of a summer evening, women & girls in their white cotton dresses, men & boys in shirt sleeves, back, say, when Wm. McKinley or Theo. Roosevelt was in office. My grandmothers were dark haired young ladies then. Way later on one of them, Sadie, told me that the only good thing about the good old days was that they were gone. Hmm. One big opera it all is, I reckon. We take the smooth with the rough, the bitter & the sweet, and the cool sweet days then the too damned cold/too bloody hot, steamy old dog days in their season. Turn around twice & it'll be Halloween; twice more & it'll all be over.

So, eight weeks + one day of my life overlapped that of John Sloan, a painter whose work I admire a lot. He turned 80, I just now discovered, on August 2, 1951. Only had a few more weeks to live. Years and years ago I had to remember, for a test, that he was one of a group of eight painters - the Ashcan School. folks called them. 'Urban genre' paintings. Ah well. This isn't "Art Apprish" class ... I just sure like how he painted, John Sloan, birthday dude. There was this one, of young women standing on the roof of their apartment building , drying their hair in the wind, in the golden [yellow ochre, raw siena...] light of a long gone summer day not unlike today - not as warm, I can only hope....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_French_Sloan

"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it." ~Russel Baker

"Starry, starry night/ flaming flowers that brightly blaze..." Don McLean

So, it appears that Lydia Mitchell of Nantucket gave birth to a daughter on this day in 1818, and named her Maria. Three score years & ten she'd be allotted. during which she'd study the stars so capably that she would become a professor of astronomy. An observatory, naturally enough, a liberty ship, and a lunar crater would bear her name.

It's a safe wager that M.M. would have heard this bit of poetry some English lady wrote: "The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled/The flame that lit the battle's wreck/Shown 'round him o'er the dead." Me, I heard it recited on an episode of Mapp & Lucia. Anyway, I just found out that said battle occurred at the mouth of the Nile on this date in 1798. Many a French & British sailor suffered terribly and/or died that first of August and Admiral Horatio Nelson had glorious victory. Napoleon Bonaparte, not so much.

Just for you to know.