A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,
offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at
first she’d found me—
I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable,
out-of-things—
she’d decided that I was after all all right … twelve years later she comes back to me
from nowhere
and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want
she meant,
which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her which she’d easily
deflected,
but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,
what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible
humiliation.
“Shame” by C.K. Williams from Selected Poems. © Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of the poet C.K. Williams (books by this author), born in Newark, New Jersey (1936). His two greatest passions in high school were girls and basketball. He was a good basketball player, 6 feet 5 inches, and he was recruited to play in college. But then he wrote a poem for a girl he was trying to impress, and she was actually impressed, and so he decided he should be a poet instead. He dropped out of college to move to Paris because that’s where he thought a poet ought to live. He didn’t write at all while he was there, but he did realize that he didn’t know anything and should probably go back to college. He said: “It was an incredibly important time. Not much happened and yet my life began then. I discovered the limits of loneliness.” He went back and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and started publishing books of poetry, books like Tar (1983), Flesh and Blood (1987), and The Singing (2003), which won the National Book Award.
It was on this day in 1918 that British war poet Wilfred Owen (books by this author) was killed in World War I, at the age of 25. In the days before his death, Owen had been excited because he knew the war was almost over. The Germans were retreating and the French had joyfully welcomed the British troops. In his last letter to his mother, Owens wrote: “It is a great life. I am more oblivious than yourself, dear Mother, of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, and the hollow crashing of the shells. Of this I am certain: you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.” A few days later, he was trying to get his men across a canal in the early morning hours when they were attacked by enemy fire, and Owen was fatally wounded. The war ended the following week.
Today is the birthday of the “cowboy philosopher” Will Rogers (1879) (books by this author). He was born on a ranch near Oologah, Oklahoma, although Oklahoma was still the Cherokee Nation at that time. He grew up on a cattle ranch, and perfected his trick roping skills. He even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for throwing three lassos at once to rope a galloping horse and rider: one rope went around the horse’s neck, the second went around the rider, and the third captured the horse’s legs. He was a popular feature of Wild West shows, and then moved on to vaudeville and, eventually, Broadway and movies. He wrote a column for the Saturday Evening Post, and his weekly radio broadcast was one of the first humorous political shows.
In 1931, in the middle of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover invited Rogers to join him for a radio address. In a speech that came to be known as “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines,” Rogers sold the message that Hoover had intended: that towns and cities should step up and do their part to find jobs for the millions of unemployed. But then he went off message to criticize the nation’s leaders for not doing enough: “Now we read the papers every day, and they get us all excited over one or a dozen different problems that’s supposed to be before the country. [...] The only problem that confronts this country today is at least 7 million people are out of work. [...] It’s to see that every man that wants to is able to work, is allowed to find a place to go to work, and also to arrange some way of getting more equal distribution of wealth in the country.”
Rogers wrote six books and more than 3,600 articles; he traveled around the world three times; and he appeared in 71 movies. He was killed in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935.
On this day in 1879, the first cash register was patented by James J. Ritty of Dayton, Ohio. Ritty owned a saloon in Dayton, and his bartenders dipped into the till regularly, causing him great stress. So he took a sea voyage to Europe to relax. While on board, he noticed a machine that was used to count revolutions of the steam ship’s propellers, and make a record of the information. Using this model, he came up with the idea to record cash transactions with a machine. With patent number 221360, the prototype for the modern cash register was born, and shortly afterward, the National Cash Register Company.