Why do I love getting up every morning?
- My exercising as soon as I hop out of bed sets me up for a healthy-minded day
- My short daily prayer expresses my gratitude
- The Calm app sends me off on a serene, mindful tract
provides me: - And The Writers Almanac
- mental stimulation
- an appreciation of our fellow human beings
- an unending and interesting historical tidbits highlights authors and poets, plus introducing me to new ones
Here’s two delightful excerpts from two poets:
“Possibilities” by Linda Pastan
Today I drove past a house
we almost bought and heard
through the open window music
made by some other family.
We don’t make music ourselves, in fact
we define our differences
by what we listen to.
And what we mean by family
has changed since then
as we grew larger then smaller again
in ways we knew would happen
and yet didn’t expect
“The Splits” by Connie Wanek
“The world of my youth was divided
into girls who could and girls who couldn’t
slide casually to the floor,
one leg aft and one fore, while their faces
retained a sprightly cheer..,
Yet the splits seemed less a skill
than a gift of birth: Churchillian pluck
combined with a stroke of luck
like a pretty face with a strong chin.
One felt that even as babies
some girls were pre-dispositioned.
Here’s some historical tidbits worth noting:
October 11: It was on this day in 1975 that Saturday Night Live had its premiere, with George Carlin as host. The first sketch had Michael O’Donoghue as an ESL teacher attempting to teach English to his Eastern European student, John Belushi. Janis Ian and Billy Preston played music, Andy Kaufman and the Muppets were special guests, and Paul Simon made an appearance.
October 11: This is the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, born in New York City (1884), who said, “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”
During World War I, she went off to Europe and visited wounded and shell-shocked soldiers in hospitals there. Later, during her husband’s presidency, she campaigned hard on civil rights issues — not a universally popular thing in the 1930s and 1940s, or in 2020…
She also said: “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
October 14: Theodore Roosevelt was shot at a campaign stop on this day in 1912… when John Schrank, an unemployed saloonkeeper, shot him with a Colt revolver from a distance of five feet. Schrank intended to stop him from pursuing a third term as president…The crowd tackled the shooter, but Roosevelt’s composure was not ruffled in the least. He asked Schrank why he’d done it, and turned the man over to the police when he received no answer. Roosevelt then coughed experimentally into his hand, and deduced that the bullet had not penetrated his lungs, because he didn’t cough up any blood. He insisted on proceeding to the Milwaukee Auditorium, where he delivered a 90-minute speech as scheduled.
He began by calling for quiet, and then told the stunned crowd: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot… He opened his coat to reveal his bloodstained shirt, and credited the 50-page speech in his breast pocket for saving his life.
Roosevelt blamed the media for provoking the shooter: “It is a very natural thing,” he said, “that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers.”
He also predicted that such shootings would become more commonplace, should the government fail to care for the well-being of all its citizens.
In the end, Roosevelt came in second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson…Schrank’s bullet remained lodged in Roosevelt’s rib for the rest of his life.
The secret to waking up happy? Having something to look forward to.
Subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac:
Listen to the audio
Subscribe to this email newsletter
Subscribe to the Apple Podcast
Enable on Alexa
And you will have something to look forward to also.
Keep Preserving Your Bloom,
Iris Ruth Pastor