So, yesterday morning, Saturday morning, the 25th of September [Wm. Faulkner's 113th birthday as well as the anniversary of the day in 1764 that Fletcher Christian was born, completely unaware that one day Clark Gable then Marlon Brando then Mel Gibson would portray him in the movies] , I was a few blocks from this here desk, down at the Nat'l Frontier Trails Museum. Should you ever be in Independence, Missouri, do be going to 318 West Pacific and see for yourself all manner of information & exhibits concerning the old trails to Santa Fe, Oregon, & California; the peltry trade, scouts, trappers, mountain men & women and assorted other tough dudes & dudettes who set off to settle the West, never mind/Heaven help/pity the people who were already living there. . Going West: Nothing I would have done, had I lived back then. A horrid camping trip it would have seemed to me.

Where was I? Yes: I was talking to a gathering of pleasant advocates of frontier history and hearty breakfasts about the making of books, particularly my books about the old Pathfinder, Daniel Boone http://www.amazon.com/Trailblazing-Daniel-Americans-Harness-Histories/dp/1426301456 and poor Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the 1st (along w/ Eliza Hart Spalding, a heroic frontier teacher/missionary), U.S. female citizen to go all the way to the Pacific NW on what would become the Oregon Trail, in 1836. Alas, poor Narcissa and her doctor-husband Marcus had no training whatsoever - I'd say that they had no business whatsoever, [but that's just me, unable to imagine caring so deeply], going way out to the magnificent boondocks forever to Christianize the locals, all ending up in the most hellacious & deadly-miserable unintended consequences in late autumn 1847 http://www.amazon.com/Narcissa-Whitman-Faithful-History-Histories/dp/0792259203

Tremendous fun it was, enjoying warm eggs, bacon, & biscuits then talking with and to nice people about long-gone folks a million times more heroic than I. And now it's Sunday, the 26th of September, 190 years today since 85-year-old Daniel Boone passed away. A privilege it was to write about him, to imagine him, to draw what he might have looked like. R. I. P., D. B.

So, did you know that it was on this day, September 21, this day in history, in 1938, when Herr Hitler was ruining many a life and fixing to invade western Europe, when Jeepers, Creepers was a hit song, when Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published The Yearling and Daphne du Maurier published Rebecca (one of my favorite novels ever, MUCH, ever so much better than the fine film], that a big whacking hurricane swept through New England and killed as many as 800 people?

Well, now you do.

do check out this blog if you haven't - I hope you will: http://inkrethink.blogspot.com/

Dang!

"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained." President James A. Garfield, whose life ended on this day, 19 September, 1881, thanks to Charles Guiteau, his assassin

So, dang – had I had the will to write anything yesterday OR the day before, I'd have noted here that yesterday was the 301st birthday of English writer Samuel Johnson. And if Greta Garbo was still alive, she might well have been feeling too old and puny yesterday, bless her, to have celebrated her 105th birthday.

I meant to then did not note here that the 17th of September was Constitution Day, the anniversary of the cool clear Monday in 1787, in Philadelphia, PA, when 39 men [out of a delegation of 55] put their names to the newly-crafted Constitution of the United States. Our handmade government. Thousands had fought, campaigned, argued, lost their lives for the ideal of self-governance and have since that day. Plenty of folks were still alive 75 years later, when tens of thousands of Americans fought one another on September 17, 1862, at Sharpsburg, MD, for one another, for their home folks' way of life, and for that ideal. More than 26,000 American fighters were wounded, killed, or went missing that day in the Battle of Antietam. Just imagine.

Dang.

So, here on the occasion of 390 years having passed since the good ship Mayflower left England for the New World, here's a passage from The Adventurous LIfe of Myles Standish and the Amazing-But-True Survival Story of Plymouth Colony (Nat'l Geographic, 2006. oh baby, I illustrated it, too.) a book of mine which far more people would have purchased and read if the world wasn't so horrible and rotten [she wrote with a twinkle in her eye]:

Did Myles and Rose Standish squeeze each other's hands as the Mayflower sailed into the English Channel? As the buildings of Plymouth got smaller and smaller? Did they shade their eyes and squint up at Master Jones? There he stood, up on the lofty poop deck, taking them sailing into the west and away, September 6 [old calendar], 1620.

...It's likely that even tough, 36-year-old Myles Standish was seasick as a "fine small gale" blew the tiny ship out on the North Atlantic. Almost all of the other passengers were. These homesick, seasick, psalm-singing landlubbers got on the crew's nerves and got in their way as sailors worked the sails and the multitudes of ropes that drove the ship. Little kids chattered or cried when men were trying to sleep. The crew cussed at and made fun of these "glib-gibbery puke-stockings," who began their days praying and singing on the upper deck. One in particular kept threatening to toss them all overboard – until he got sick, so sick that he died. It was his body that went into the sea. Had God Himself, the superstitious sailors wondered, punished their big-mouthed buddy? They cut out the teasing, just in case.

Viva Mexico

So, sure, a diligent person would have noted here that yesterday the Iranians finally released at least ONE of a trio of innocent hikers. And yesterday marked the day when lawyer Francis Scott Key wrote a notable poem on the 14th of September, 1814. The Defense of Fort McHenry. We know the words, mostly, as the lyrics of our national anthem, which should be the song originating with the poem by Miss Katherine Lee Bates, America the Beautiful. Just my opinion.

In any case, TODAY [a dark, damp, misty day hung about with storms] is absolutely infested with commemorations, some horrid & brutal, some festive, all remarkable.

Today marks the Bicentennial of Mexico's independence from Spain. 'twas on this night in 1810 that Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla called for rebellion, called for Mexicans to rise up against their Spanish overlords. The padre's 'Grito de Dolores' [Cry of Dolores] : "My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen by three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once… Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government!" The priest? Captured & executed in 1911. Mexican self-rule? Still a work in progress, as is ours.

“Poor Mexico: So Far From God, And So Close to the United States” José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori, b. 15 Sept. 1830. President of Mexico, 1884-1911

It's the birthday of U.S. President Wm. Howard "Big Bill" Taft [1857] and author Jas. Fenimore Cooper, too [1789].

Oh, and it was on this day in 1963, that some cruel bozos, convinced as all terrorists are, that they were doing a good thing, bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young ladies, who'd dressed themselves that morning in their Sunday best, were killed forever, had stolen from them all that might have done and experienced: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14).

s i g h

"Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetness into the heavenly wine."
- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Aren't those lovely words? I came across them, looking for my daily quotation, something to post onto my Facebook profile page. I looked for a Gen. Pershing quote, it being his birthday (1860). Handsome, Missouri-born, John J. "Black Jack" [so called by his Army buddies, meaning to insult him, seeing as he in charge of African-American troops] Pershing led the American Expeditionary Forces [A.E.F.], which included redheaded Albert Harley Wolfe of Missouri. Way later on, after the Great War had become known as WWI, Harley would be my Grandpa.

Both Gen. Pershing and Dr. Walter Reed [b. this day in 1851] said many fine and useful things, I'm sure, but as I'm too impatient to hunt for them beyond a quick quote search, I found Mr. Rilke's lines on September. A happy discovery. Now I'll write them down in my little book, telling the poet thank you, lost to us though he's been since 1926, back in the land of the dead.

So, had I had any inclination whatsoever to type anything this past Friday, I'd have noted that the 10th of September marked the anniversary of the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. Tame little factoid in an encylopedia. In life, a nightmare for all concerned. 10 Sept was Huey Long's deathday, down in Louisiana, back in 1935. Hard times there are not forgotten, I reckon. An assassin shot 'the Kingfish' two days earlier. Blowhard he was, but he had buckets of fine notions. And not so by the way, the opening page of Robt. Penn Warren's All the King's Men, based [loosely] on Long's life [cut short] is some of the best writing ever, ever.

Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted screenwriter, passed away, too, on 10 Sept, in 1976, when my life, incidentally, was horrible, one friend's couch away from just about no place to go. sheesh... http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/dalton-trumbo/trumbo/1165/

There was a time, years' worth of time, when school children were asked to remember that poor doomed Henry Hudson first laid eyes on Manhattan Island on 11 Sept 11, 1609. And I'll bet generations of neighbors in eastern Pennsylvania remembered September 11 as the day soldiers suffered & pounded their way through the Battle of the Brandywine in 1777. All overshadowed now, these past nine years. For any who'd welcome some clarity, some coherent background, do try & find your way to seeing & hearing [on HBO, perhaps] journalist Lawrence Wright's My Trip to Al-Qaeda http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1608182/

And then, and then here it is today and now it's nearly gone, this 12th of September, the day that wondrous curmudgeon H. L. Mencken was born in 1880 and Lester Harness, my dear uncle was born in 1916, the day in 1953 that a lovely debutante married skinny Jack Kennedy. I"ll bet he promised fidelity that day. Ah well. There's so much bad in the best of us, so much good in the worst of us, that it little behooves any of us to compare ourselves with the rest of us. So said a saying, anyway, on the wall of my poor mom's horrible kitchen. God rest her.