The Writer's Almanac for February 20, 2019 - Garrison Keillor

The Writer’s Almanac for February 20, 2019

Thirst
by Kim Dower

My father never saw my house
though without his modest savings
we never could have bought it.

My father didn’t know his grandson
past the age of ten, but today at 28
my boy has his eyes

and many of his talents. My father
died thirsty. We couldn’t fill
his needs; no one could.

He had a big personality, my mother
would say, sucked the air
out of a room, needed you to pay

attention to his every word, a wall
of talk we wanted to jump over.
My father could tell a good

joke, do the accents, had the timing.
Why wasn’t that appreciated.
He could sell anything, untangle a knot

out of the most delicate chain.
His stuff looked nice, his paintings framed.
He’d serve pats of butter on a dish

restaurant style. Our people leave us
and we let them go. They fade
into the tapestry of the dead,

an occasional memory slapping us
in the face tapping us on the shoulder
kissing the breeze by our cheek.

We wait for the wind to blow
these reminders, like it did for me today,
just now in my garden that he never saw,

but would have loved, even though my roses
are struggling, their white petals dropping.
So thirsty they are; so ready for a drink.

“Thirst” by Kim Dower from Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave. © Red Hen Press, 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Joshua Slocum was born on this day in 1844 in Wilmot, Nova Scotia. He was the first man to sail around the world singlehandedly.

In April 1895, at the age of 54, he set sail from Boston in an old fishing boat to Nova Scotia, the Azores, Gibraltar, Samoa, Australia, South America, the West Indies and finally, three years later, to Newport, R.I., to complete his circumnavigation. And he wrote a book about it Sailing Alone Around the World, an international best-seller.

It was on this day in 1872 that the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public in Manhattan in rented space on Fifth Avenue, with a collection of Flemish and Dutch paintings. Eventually they leased land from the city on the east side of Central Park and built a permanent home there..

It’s the birthday of photographer Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco (1902).

When he was 14, his parents gave him a Kodak #1 Box Brownie camera and a trip to Yosemite National Park. He had been a pianist but Yosemite made him a photographer and he visited Yosemite every summer after that for the rest of his life.

He died in 1984 at the age of 82. Six months later, Congress approved the preservation of more than 200,000 acres near Yosemite as the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area.

On this date in 1792, George Washington established the United States Post Office Department. Benjamin Franklin was the first postmaster general and he set up a basic method of operation still in use.

On this day in 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. In the Mercury Project Friendship 7 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Glenn orbited the Earth three times in five hours, flying manually for the second and third orbits, and splashing down in the Atlantic near Bermuda.

It was on this day in 1877 that Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake had its premiere performance by the Imperial Ballet in Moscow. It was Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, and it got bad reviews, mainly about the choreography. It was revived with a new choreographer Marius Petipa and was a success in 1895, but Tchaikovsky had died in the meantime and never got to see it.