There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.
“In the Library” by Charles Simic from The Voice at 3:00am. © Harcourt, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Today is Mother’s Day. The holiday was the idea of a woman named Anna Jarvis, a schoolteacher who had lived with her mother for most of her life. After her mother died, she got the idea to set aside one day a year for the celebration of mothers. She chose the second Sunday in May because that was when her own mother had died. The first Mother’s Day celebration was held at Anna Jarvis’s church on May 10, 1908, and at the end of the service Anna Jarvis gave each mother a carnation, because carnations had been her mother’s favorite flowers.
The idea for the holiday spread across the country, and then in May of 1914, an Alabama legislator named Thomas “Cotton Tom” Heflin introduced a bill to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. When President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill, he ordered flags to be flown on Mother’s Day from all public buildings. Cotton Tom said, “The flag was never used in a more beautiful and sacred cause than when flying above that tender, gentle army: the mothers of America.”
The First Transcontinental Railroad was completed on this date in 1869. It was a project that had been discussed since the 1830s, when railroads were really taking off in America, and Europeans were settling in California in increasing numbers. But people couldn’t decide on the best route. Some argued for a central route through Wyoming and Nebraska, and others felt a southern route through Texas was better because it would avoid the Rocky Mountains. As time went on, the Pony Express proved that the central route was passable even in the winter — which had been a major concern — and Texas allied itself with the Confederacy in the Civil War, so the central route won. The southern transcontinental route was eventually built in 1881, and the Interstate 10 highway roughly follows that route today.
The building of a transcontinental railroad was one of Abraham Lincoln’s big goals during his presidency. He signed legislation to construct the line in July 1862, and two companies were hired: Central Pacific would build from west to east, and Union Pacific would build from east to west. The law arranged to pay the companies per mile, and they exploited that provision whenever they were able. The main stockholder of Union Pacific, Thomas Clark Durant, had been Lincoln’s employer before Lincoln entered politics. Even though the law stated that no stockholder could own more than 10 percent of the company, Durant worked around this through the use of proxies. He arranged to add extra miles to the track and usually ran it conveniently through land that he owned, so he got paid for that too. When this came to light in 1872, it became one of the major scandals of the 19th century.
It wasn’t just corruption that marred the project. Chinese immigrants did much of the hard labor, and they were paid much less than their white counterparts. And the railroad route went through American Indian lands in violation of government treaties. Hunting grounds were disrupted, and bison — the Native Americans’ main food source — were killed or maimed by the “cow catchers” on the front of the locomotives. Once the railroad was complete, passengers would often shoot the bison from train windows just for fun. And since the railroad made it easy to transport large loads of buffalo hides to markets in the east, professional hunters slaughtered and skinned thousands of the animals, leaving the carcasses to rot.
Finally, on May 10, 1869, the two companies met up at Promontory Point, Utah. California governor Leland Stanford drove the ceremonial “Golden Spike” from California, and two other ceremonial spikes — a silver one from Nevada, and one made of gold, silver, and iron from Arizona — were also placed with great fanfare. The last railroad tie was made of California laurel. Even though the railroad now ran all the way west to Sacramento, it didn’t go all the way to the East Coast in an unbroken line: it stopped outside Omaha, and rail service didn’t resume for about 150 miles. The true final connection between the coasts didn’t happen for more than a year, but when it was finally completed, the journey from New York to Sacramento took about a week — a considerable improvement over the previous travel time of nearly six months.
It’s the birthday of Fred Astaire, born Frederick Austerlitz, in Omaha, Nebraska (1899). He made dancing look effortless on screen and stage, and the writer John O’Hara called him the “living symbol of all that is the best of show business.”
He started dancing when he was four, and when he was six he formed an act with his sister, Adele, that became a popular vaudeville attraction on Broadway. When Adele retired in 1932, Astaire made a screen test. The movie executive wrote: “Can’t act, can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.” Still, Astaire got a part in Dancing Lady (1933). It starred Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and the Three Stooges.
He’s famous for the movies he made with his dancing partner Ginger Rogers: classics like The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), and Swing Time (1936). They rubbed off on each another. People said she gave him sex appeal, and he gave her class. Their only on-screen kiss came in the movie Carefree (1938), in a dream sequence.
He was a perfectionist who worked up to 18 hours a day. He said, “The only way I know to get a good show is to practice, sweat, rehearse, and worry.” He demanded the same of his partners. One scene in Swing Time took 47 takes to film, and by the end Ginger’s feet were bleeding. In the film, she says, “I’ve danced with you. I’m never going to dance again.”
In one routine, Astaire had to toss an umbrella across a room, into an umbrella stand. He said: “I did it 45 times, and it always hit the edge. So I said, ‘That’s it! Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m coming back, and I’m going to get [it].’ [...] I came back next morning fresh as a daisy, and that umbrella went into the stand on the first take.”
He kept dancing until late in his life. At age 50, he said: “How do I keep going? What do I do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don’t eat health foods. I never dance unless I have to. I don’t work out in a gym. Vitamin pills? Never! Who needs ’em?” He said: “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”
He said: “The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it’s considered to be your style.”