Happy Memorial Day

Celebrated: In the United States since 1866

I am — just barely — old enough to remember when Southerners called it Decoration Day, and when it was always May 30 instead of the last Monday in May. In elementary school they told us it had even started in Richmond, during the Civil War, when Confederate mothers and widows went to the cemetery to decorate the graves of their dead, and decided to decorate the graves of the Union dead as well.

Because Memorial Day isn't about celebrating military service, or even honoring those who serve. It's about remembering the dead, whether or not we believed in the cause they fought for.

According to legend, after the battle of Fredericksburg, General Robert E. Lee turned to Lt. General James Longstreet and said, "It is well that war is so terrible—we would grow too fond of it." You'll find several different versions of this quotation out there. Military historians love it, but it wasn't recorded at the time, and was first cited in a biography of Lee published five years after the war. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't. It gets quoted because it's true.

My thoughts about these things are not well organized, after a week that included the President's remarks on drone strikes and a viewing of the ultra-violent latest Star Trek movie. Humans have always turned war into entertainment. I could argue that The Iliad was the ancient Greeks' version of a summer blockbuster. But no matter how you glitz it up or adorn it with high principles and sacred honor, the one permanent truth about war is that it kills people. People die, and they leave parents and spouses and children to mourn them. We cannot allow ourselves to forget this. We cannot fool ourselves that anything we do — drone strikes, for God's sake! — absolves us of the personal moral responsibility we all bear for joining in or supporting any enterprise that is going to get people killed.

I'm not saying war is never justified. I grew up in a military household, and I do believe some things are worth dying for. But Memorial Day is a day for us to count our losses, to face them with all the wild grief they deserve, so that we can honestly answer the question of what might be worth more of those losses in the future.

Happy Feast of St. Bernadette

Celebrated: By Catholics since 1933

Bernadette Soubirous died of tuberculosis at the age of 35 on April 16, 1879. On February 11, 1858, when she was only 14 years old, she sat in a grotto to take her shoes off and saw a dazzling light, and a small lady in white. This lady, who never identified herself to Bernadette, appeared to her again three days later, and asked Bernadette to come back every day for a fortnight. This Bernadette did, and the apparition called for penance in the only language Bernadette spoke — a dialect of Occitan, a Romance language spoken in small areas of France, Spain and Italy. As a symbol of her repentance, Bernadette was to drink from the muddy spring in the grotto, and eat the plants that grew there — but as Bernadette did this, the waters ran clear.

Even at the time, people thought that Bernadette was crazy. The lady told Bernadette that a chapel should be built on the site, and Bernadette relayed this message to her parish priest. The priest asked for proof, as any of us would.

Bernadette had another vision, during which she held a candle until it burned all the way down — but did not burn her. During this vision, the lady finally identified herself. "I am the Immaculate Conception," she said, the one human being born without original sin, the link between the Almighty and us: Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Things can be true even if they never really happened (ask any novelist). Things don't need scientific explanations to be revelations. I am a gatherer of facts and a stickler for accurate reporting, but I understand that some truths cannot be contained in the physical.

This is always a tricky time of year for me — spiritually, financially, emotionally, every which way. The lovely and talented Claire Bea was born 27 years ago last week. It is tax time and spring time and Eastertide and in general a time of year when I tally up gains and losses, and measure what I have and who I am against the things I meant to do and the person (people, in fact) I wanted to be. But I look at the story of Bernadette and I see that things can sometimes be simple, and that in such simplicity we can find clarity, grace and healing.

The Catholic Church, which is more rigorous about these things than skeptics might believe, has confirmed 67 cures at Lourdes as having no reasonable medical explanation. Sixty-seven among tens of thousands might fall within the standard deviation; but what is a miracle, if not rare? And does a miracle exist at all if it goes unrecognized?

Our lives are full of miracles we no longer even notice, from internal combustion engines to ice in our cocktails. You may say that these are not miracles; they are simply things I'm too ignorant to understand.

And I would say: Exactly.

Happy Easter!

Celebrated: By Christians for approximately 1,980 years



Humans would not be human if we were perfect, because that would make us no different from God. In creating us as separate creatures, God had to make us flawed, and the instrument of our difference is free will. We are born with free will, and what we trade for that free will is exile from Paradise. But that would be too lonely, and too sad, and too permanent. There had to be a way for us to get back home, and Easter is the revelation and the promise of that road home.

It's also the first holiday I have any conscious memory of: April 14, 1968, in our new home in Norfolk, Virginia. I had a blue coat and a white hat with a black ribbon woven into it, black patent leather shoes and my own tiny handbag. My twin sister, Kathy, had a spring green coat (to go with her red hair) and a yellow hat I envied, although in retrospect I see that it would not have gone with my coat, as Mom told me at the time.

We were not quite two and a half, and Mom was newly pregnant with what would turn out to be our sisters Peggy and Susan, born two days before Thanksgiving that year. Dad was home that weekend between training exercises on the USS Austin, an amphibious ship that was in and out of port but at least wasn't going to Vietnam. That Easter, Dad gave us a German Shepherd-Alaskan Husky puppy, a ball of white fur my mother called Boyfriend. Boyfriend, Kathy and I were toddlers together, and he was the gentlest, sweetest dog imaginable, though he grew to be enormous. (Enormous to a three-year-old, at least; I have no idea how big he actually was, because I've never seen a picture of him as a grown dog.)

I don't take pictures and I'm not good about keeping pictures, but somewhere there's a photo of Kathy and me and Boyfriend that Easter, and I wish I had it. We had to give Boyfriend away when Dad got transferred a year later, and the thought of that still makes me cry, more than 40 years later.

Happy Holi!

Celebrated: By Hindus around the world, but especially in places associated with Lord Krishna

Celebrated on the day after the March full moon, Holi is also called the Festival of Colors and the Spring Festival. It commemorates the death of Holika, a female demon whose brother, Hiranyakashipu, was king of demons and burned her to death, and the immortality of Hiranyakashipu's son Prahlada, who was burned but did not die because of his devotion to Vishnu. Holika's sacrifice and Prahlada's survival demonstrate the power of good over evil, and the triumph of spring over winter.

Holi also celebrates the romance between Lord Krishna and his lover, Radha. Krishna and his friends traveled to Radha's house to tease her and her friends, and Krishna painted Radha's face so that she would be dark, as he was. Holi is thus a festival of pranks and painting people with bright colors, through a combination of colored powders and water.

It would be a gross oversimplification to say that Holi is the Hindu version of Mardi Gras, but parallels exist. During Holi, traditional rules don't apply. "Bura na mano, Holi hai," is what people say: "Never mind, it's Holi!" Castes mix, people eat and drink too much, and bhang — Indian marijuana — is smoked, eaten and drunk. The festival usually lasts two days, but can last for weeks before and after in the Braj region, the land of Krishna.

Central Maine feels very far from any celebration of Holi, and I could use a little color in my life right now. But the last of the snow is melting, and the sky is more blue than gray, and it helps to know that spring has arrived in some parts of the world.

Happy Passover

Celebrated: For more than 3,000 years, by Jews and followers of successor faiths (including Christianity), from the 15th day of Nisan to the 22nd day of Nisan

Chag sameach, everybody. Passover and Holy Week don't always fall during the same week, but they should, and this week they do. From a theological standpoint, it's critically important that Jesus died during the Passover festival; he was the firstborn who sacrificed himself so that everyone else could be saved. But that's a longer discussion than I'm up for this morning, so we'll move along.

The God of the Old Testament is an angry, scary God — usually just, but not always. I was five or six when I first understood the Passover story, and what caught my imagination was not the promise of redemption but all the blood and guts that preceded it. God wanted Pharoah to liberate the Jewish people who were held in slavery, and when Pharoah rejected Moses's message, God sent ten successive plagues to show the futility of human opposition to God's will.

The tenth plague was the death of every firstborn son of Egypt, but God told Moses he would spare the Israelites — as long as they marked their doors with the blood of a lamb. After Pharoah saw this devastation, he ordered the Israelites out of Egypt, setting things up for the next 3,000+ years of wars over real estate.

Even when I was five or six, though, it did not escape me that the Jews weren't spared the first nine plagues, and those were horrible enough:

1. The plague of blood - the water of the Nile turned to blood, killing all the fish and leaving everyone with nothing to drink.
2. The plague of frogs - the Nile teemed with frogs, which invaded every room of every house in Egypt. This plague was so terrible that Pharoah actually agreed to liberate the slaves, though he changed his mind as soon as the frogs died.
3. The plague of fleas (or lice, or gnats) - Egypt became infested with small insects. If you've ever suffered a flea infestation, you know they don't care about their targets' religion.
4. The plague of flies - God sent swarms of flies to attack the Egyptians' livestock. According to the Torah, this plague did not affect the Land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived, but everyone would have suffered from the death of livestock.
5. The plague of disease - After the flies, a mysterious disease killed all the Egyptians' livestock, though the Israelites' cattle were spared. Even if this were true, Israelite slaves in Egyptian homes would have suffered from this, wouldn't they? 
6. The plague of boils - Moses and Aaron threw soot into the sky, and every person or animal touched by it was infected with boils. Presumably Moses and Aaron weren't.
7. The plague of hail - Thunder, hail and lightning fell on the entire land of Egypt, the worst storm in recorded history. Again, according to Exodus, the Land of Goshen, in the northeastern Nile delta, was spared.
8. The plague of locusts - Before the eighth plague, God actually told Moses that he would harden Pharoah's heart just so Egypt would have to suffer through the last three plagues. That bothered me in first grade, and it bothers me still. Why? And locusts are gross. 1972 was a cicada year in northern Virginia, where we were living, and I still remember the horror of stepping on a cicada shell with bare feet. They look like prehistoric monsters. They are prehistoric monsters. I don't care that they're edible, or even kosher.
9. The plague of darkness - Moses stretched out his hands and caused the sun to disappear from Egypt from three days, and the Land of Goshen was not exempt. 

My 1972 summer of locusts was also the summer of a total solar eclipse. The connection was not lost on my six-year-old brain. I was an anxious child to begin with, and for the first time in my life I was grateful to be the second twin, and a girl. If anyone was going to be killed, it would be my (older) twin sister, Kathy, or better yet, my two-year-old brother, Ed, who was no use to anyone, as far as I could tell. (Sorry, Ed.)

The lesson I took from all of this — which I still think is the lesson we're supposed to take from all of this — is that the universe, also known as God, is a random, angry place, and even the righteous can't count on being spared.

But sometimes we are spared. And when we are, we should celebrate and be glad, and thank the Power that Is, and feast while the food's available. Which is the point of the Passover festival. Where's the afikomen?

Happy Susan and Mike's Wedding Day!

Celebrated: Today and for many years to come

My sister Susan and her fiance, Mike, are getting married in Richmond today. Most of our extended family has gathered, glad to have a reason to get together that isn't a funeral. The weather is perfect, presumably arranged by our mother from wherever she's watching.

I like weddings. I believe in marriage, in a way that may be possible only for the congenitally unmarried. I believe in it as both a social construct and a sacrament, the only sacrament that two people bestow upon each other. In standing up and making that promise before the community, two people create something that is separate from them and more than they could ever hope to be alone. A new family forms from two old ones, and humanity's story continues.

It's a lovely thing to be asked to witness, and I am glad and grateful to be here. Best wishes to Susan and Mike as they start this next phase of their life together.

Happy Inauguration Day

Celebrated: In the United States, every four years since 1789

Greetings from Washington, DC, where President Barack Obama just took the oath of office for a second term as 44th President of the United States of America.

I've been reading a lot lately, for work and for pleasure, about the pervasively corrupting force of nationalism, and how nationalism can become a pretext and an excuse for the worst of human behavior. I have never been entirely comfortable with the idea of being proud to be an American, because my American identity is an accident of lucky parentage.

And yet today reminds us of why and how it is possible to be proud of being an American — because the American identity is not about bloodlines but about the joint, collective agreement that all humans are created equal, with basic rights that include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's right there in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

To be an American is to accept the obligations of that as well as the rights. The American Dream is not about having more but about doing better, in all the ways it is possible to do better: building not just prosperity, but knowledge and kindness and courage and strength. We aspire, and that aspiration is a great thing, even if we fail along the way. "We must act knowing that our work will be imperfect," the President said today.

We can learn and we can change, not only as individuals but as a nation. That is something to be proud of, as we celebrate the election of the mixed-race son of an immigrant, on the national holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King.

Happy National Soup Month

Celebrated: In the United States, origins obscure

A broad consensus agrees that January is National Soup Month, but I can't find any information about who declared it so, or when. But of course January is National Soup Month; soup is what you want to eat in cold weather. A food website I won't embarrass notes that soup dates to prehistoric times, and again I say of course: soup was probably the first recipe of any kind.

What is there to say about soup? "Only the pure in heart can make a good soup," wrote Ludwig von Beethoven, and the Irish poet Brendan Behan once said that if it were raining soup, the Irish would go outside with forks. But any literary discussion of soup begins and ends with the late, beloved master Maurice Sendak.

In January it's so nice
While slipping on the sliding ice
To sip hot chicken soup with rice
Sipping once, sipping twice
Sipping chicken soup with rice

That link goes to a video of the Carole King song, which I almost embedded. But then I remembered my all-time favorite TV commercial of any kind, ever, which YouTube unfairly labels as "Creepy Alien Commercial." It just happens to be for Campbell's Soup, and I am delighted to have an excuse to post it here.

Happy National Apricot Day

Celebrated: In the United States, origins obscure

I admit I didn't spend much time this morning looking for the origins of National Apricot Day, but it seems to be another industry-backed commemoration. I'd like to ask someone why this day falls in January, when the growing season is summer; if I want to buy apricots today, they'll have to be dried.

If you find US-grown apricots in the supermarket, they almost certainly came from California. About 94% of the nation's apricots are grown in California, with most of the rest coming from Washington and Utah. They need a Mediterranean-style climate — long, dry summers and cool, wet winters — and did not thrive when English explorers brought them to the East coast in the 17th century.

They're one of the oldest cultivated fruits, so old that scientists aren't sure where they originated; I've seen claims for India, China and Armenia. Alexander gets credit for introducing them to Greece, but they're also mentioned in the Bible, and the "golden apple" that started the Trojan War might well have been an apricot. Today, most of the world's apricots are grown in Turkey, Iran and Uzbekistan.

Apricots are a stone fruit, of the genus Prunus, most closely related to plum. They're important to Chinese medicine, and medieval Europeans used dried apricots to treat constipation and induce labor (a plot point in The Duchess of Malfi). Their pits have measurable amounts of cyanide in them, though not enough to kill you unless you eat a lot of them. That cyanide is part of apricots' natural compound amygdalin, which some claim can be used to treat cancer; amygdalin is the basis of the drug Laetrile, banned by the USDA in 1977. The FDA calls Laetrile a "highly toxic product that has not shown any effect on treating cancer," and Steve McQueen died while on a Laetrile treatment program in Mexico.

This is not, of course, to say that apricots killed Steve McQueen.

Happy Kim Jong-Un's Birthday

Celebrated: In North Korea since 1983 or 1984, a national holiday for the first time last year

The North Korea state radio station reported that Kim Jong-Un was personally distributing two pounds of candy to every child in North Korea in celebration of his birthday — although it's not clear how old he is, or even that today is the actual date. Officially, he's 29 today. But January 8 is also Elvis' birthday, and wouldn't that be enough to make anyone claim it for their own?

At 29, Kim Jong-Un is the world's youngest head of state. The next youngest is Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, Dragon King of Bhutan, who rules over fewer than a million people and — as far as we know — has no access to nuclear weapons. North Korea, on the other hand, is a nation of 24.5 million, of whom approximately 9.5 million (39%) serve in the active or reserve military or some kind of paramilitary organization.

Serving in the military is the best way to get access to food. North Korea's Songun policy, or "Military First," gives members of the military priority when distributing any scarce resources. This policy was directly responsible for astronomical (though still obscure) child mortality rates during the great famine of 1994-98, when the World Health Organization estimated death rates at 93 for every 1,000 children. Even today, if Kim Jong-Un really did give kids candy, it might be the only food they get today; drought and flooding destroyed at least 13% of last year's grain harvest, driving speculation that the country faces another terrible famine. The U.N. reported last year that one in three North Korean children are already stunted by malnutrition.

North Korea is a human rights calamity that the international community can't do much about. It's been that way for 60 years, since the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953 codified the border of North and South Korea and created the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between them. Under President Obama, the U.S. has reached out to North Korea to try to stop its nuclear program and feed its people, culminating in a "Leap Day" deal last February under which North Korea agreed to suspend parts of its nuclear program in exchange for massive amounts of food aid. That deal lasted less than a month; North Korea announced plans to launch a satellite in March, and by the end of the month, the US had suspended its aid programs.

It's human nature to accept one's environment as normal, whatever "normal" may be. Disturbing that equilibrium requires outside intervention of some kind; it's no coincidence, for example, that the Soviet Union fell within a couple of years of European MTV becoming available to viewers in then-Leningrad. (I'm not saying MTV led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the realization that the rest of the world didn't live in Soviet-style misery was a critical element in the collapse of the old regime.)

A large portion of the North Korean population, however, doesn't even have reliable access to electricity. What would it take to show them the possibility of a different way of life?

Happy Plough Monday

Celebrated: In medieval England, on the first Monday after Twelfth Night

Parts of England still celebrate Plough Monday, which marks the return of farmers to the fields after the 12 days of Christmas. It's always a Monday, following the traditional blessing of the ploughs on the first Sunday of the year. On this year's calendar, today is also Distaff Day, the female equivalent, although Distaff Day is simply the first day after Twelfth Night, and can fall on any day of the week. (Apparently, spindles required no special blessing for the year. And spinning wasn't something women spent all day doing; it was what women did during their theoretical spare time, whenever they might have 15 minutes to sit without something else in their hands.)

In any case, it's the day everybody goes back to work after the holidays. Can you feel it? I can, even from my seat on the living room couch. Normal service is resuming all over the world, New Year's resolutions are clicking into place (or not), and I'd guess it will be the heaviest e-mail traffic day of the year. It feels like 2013 starts in earnest today.

The effect goes double for me, because I've spent the last month not only celebrating the holidays but indulging my seasonal depression and my grief over Dizzy. That stops today. If you've been waiting to get something back from me, I apologize for the delay, thank you for your patience, and promise you'll see it in the next day or two.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany

Celebrated: in the Christian world since about the fourth century AD/CE

First, listen to T.S. Eliot read his own poem "The Journey of the Magi":



I've seen people complaining online about Christmas lights left up this week. I wish people would leave Christmas lights up even longer, but at a minimum, they ought to stay up until today.

On this day, twelve days after Christmas, Christians celebrate the visit of three Gentile wizards (the Magi, the Wise Men, certainly astrologers, possibly magicians) to the stable where Jesus was born. The twelve-day gap between Christmas and Epiphany is almost arbitrary, as indeed the calendar date of Christmas itself is. (This entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia refers to an early debate among church leaders over the actual time of year of Jesus' birth, which scholars pegged as May, not December.) The importance of Epiphany to Catholicism and the other Christian religions is that the announcement of the Messiah's arrival was not limited to Jews; a star in the sky, visible to all, drew these pagan priests to see the child whose birth would save humanity.

I find Epiphany one of the most moving of all Christian feasts, not only because it is all about gift-giving and generosity — the Almighty's generosity to humanity, the Wise Men's extravagant gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh — but because of what it must have meant to Mary and Joseph, to have strangers show up and affirm their belief. The angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary, and her whole life after that must have been terrifying. She was young, she was pregnant in a way she didn't understand at all, and the man who had promised to marry her had every right to send her away. Joseph, operating on nothing but love and faith, had taken Mary and her unborn baby on an 80-mile trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem so they could be registered together as a family. All that love, all that hope, all that faith overriding all that fear and shame and anger — and here come the exotically-garbed Wise Men to say, "We saw a star. We have come to worship the King of the Jews."

What profound relief Mary and Joseph must have felt, what wonder and joy, to have their faith confirmed in such an odd and unexpected way. Luke tells us only, "Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart."

Happy Burmese Independence Day

Celebrated: in Burma (also known as Myanmar) since 1948, when British colonial rule ended

President Barack Obama visited Burma last November, the first visit of its kind by a sitting U.S. President. (Warning: what follows is a gross oversimplification of a complicated political history that deserves further reading.) Between 1989 and 2011, the country was controlled by a military junta that changed the country's name to Myanmar (though the US and other western countries continued to call it Burma) and suppressed political dissent and ethnic minority rights movements. Before that, the country was controlled from 1962 to 1974 by a "revolutionary council" headed by General Ne Win, and from 1974 to 1988 by the Burma Socialist Programme Party, also headed by General Ne Win and his military cronies.

By 1988, Burma, a land of immense natural resources (among them oil, gas, timber, copper, and precious stones), had become one of the world's most desperately poor, oppressed nations. General Ne Win and his successors looted the country for personal gain; in 2011, Transparency International cited Myanmar as the world's third-most corrupt public sector, second only to North Korea and Somalia.

So why did the President go to Burma last year? Because things are — fingers and toes crossed — looking up. Two events permanently shook the government of Myanmar in the spring of 2008: a constitutional referendum, in April, and Cyclone Nargis in May, which killed more than 130,000 people. No one could deny that Burma's self-imposed isolation made that disaster worse than it needed to be; Burma's military leaders initially blocked offers of aid from the West, even denying visas to aid workers. General elections in 2010 were fraught with manipulation and deceit, but the military junta finally dissolved in 2011.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the Burmese opposition, was released from house arrest at the end of 2010, and took office last May as a member of the Burmese House of Representatives. President Obama met with both her and President Thein Sein, a retired general some call Burma's Gorbachev. The US has eased economic sanctions against Burma in place since 1997, and announced plans to appoint the first US ambassador to Burma since 1990.

We take democracy for granted in the United States, as much as it frustrates us, but it's not an easy system. The transition from any kind of absolute rule to democracy is daunting, because it requires a small number of people to give up what they have. Throughout human history, the traditional way of persuading people to do that has been violent revolution. Dead people can't own things. Dead people can't rule. The road toward peaceful democratic rule takes quantities of imagination and goodwill that don't come naturally to most of us, which is why we remember and honor the ones who show us how it's done.

Happy Fruitcake Toss Day

Celebrated: in the U.S. on January 3, at least since the mid-1990s (origins obscure)

Why so much hostility to fruitcake? I like it, and I'm not ashamed to say so. I thought about making my mother's recipe this year, but didn't get around to it, and no one else in my family did, either. It takes about six weeks to do it right, because after you bake the cake, you have to douse it in brandy and/or Grand Marnier and let it ferment for a while. You use high-quality fruit and none of those plasticized cubes, and it's great.

But I'm obviously in the minority, and some people feel pretty violent about this. Since 1995, the town of Manitou Springs, Colorado has held an annual Great Fruitcake Toss, similar to "pumpkin chunking" events held elsewhere in October. Contestants compete on distance, accuracy, and the ability to catch a fruitcake (weighing at least one pound) thrown by a mechanical device. (The rules specify, nothing gasoline-powered – safety first!)

Fruitcakes date back to Roman times, when they were a practical way to preserve and consume exotic fruits out of season. They represented wealth and abundance, and were traditionally used as wedding cakes. Their popularity peaked in England under Queen Victoria, who was especially fond of fruitcake and often served it at tea.

I'm always fascinated by fashions in food. How do foods come into style, and go out? Why don't we eat aspics anymore? (Other than the fact that they're gross, of course.) Will it ever be cool to like fruitcake again?

Happy Braille Literacy Month

Celebrated: By and for the blind, although I'm not sure since when. National Braille Week is January 4-10.

Louis Braille (1809-1852) lost his vision before the age of five because of an injury-related infection that could probably be treated easily today. He learned to read using the Haüy system of raised letters, which substituted the sense of touch for the sense of vision. Braille took that idea one step further by adapting a military "night writing" system of dots and dashes into an alphabet based on a six-dot cell. The six dots can be combined in 63 possible ways, allowing for symbols for letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Braille has evolved over the years to accommodate contractions and a kind of shorthand, with three "grades" available for beginning, intermediate and advanced readers.

Louis Braille published his system in 1839, while simultaneously working with the scientist Pierre Foucault on a typewriter-style machine that would emboss these dots on a page. The National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, where Braille had been educated and later served as a teacher, rejected Braille's system, and he died of tuberculosis in 1852. Although schools for the blind in other countries had started to teach braille before that, the system didn't fully capture the world's imagination until Foucault introduced his Braille typewriter at the Paris World's Fair in 1855.

Braille is a medium, not a language. My Grandma Lamb spent her career as a kindergarten teacher at the Lavelle School for the Blind, where she taught kids basic life skills — including the braille alphabet. Some of my earliest memories are of braille flashcards and record labels; at one point I could recognize the 26 alphabet letters myself, though I couldn't do it now.

For more than 150 years, braille has made the world more accessible for the blind, but its use has been declining. Some of that is the collateral damage of good intentions: mainstreaming blind kids into the school system has made their social lives easier, but has cut the most important source of braille education, specialized teachers. Better, cheaper audio technology has made more material available to blind students, though it carries obvious drawbacks: it requires electricity, and it usually requires headphones, which isolate kids even more than blindness already does.

Also, as the American Foundation for the Blind points out, "listening to a book is not the same as knowing how to read it." More than a third of legally blind students (21 and under) in the United States are classified as "non-readers." They don't have enough vision to read enhanced print, but they're not literate in braille, either. They rely on audio resources for their information. As someone facing my own vision challenges, I find that an unacceptable level of dependency on technology and the kindness of strangers. The AFB is pursuing federal legislation to make more literacy resources available to students, but you can also help with private donations to them and to Lighthouse International.

Happy New Year!

Celebrated: Worldwide since humans started to keep calendars, sometime before the 21st century BC

(Source: StoryPeople)

I have a feeling this is how my year's going to go, whether I want it to or not. That's okay. I'm overdue.

Last night I saw a passing reference to the fact that Christian Scientists don't celebrate New Year's Eve, which I hadn't realized but makes sense. Christian Science holds that all is is spirit, and that the material is only a manifestation of spirit (which is not the same as an illusion). So they don't acknowledge the passage of time, because spirit is eternal.

But I think — begging to differ with Mary Baker Eddy, who's not around to defend herself — that the passage of time might be the most important way we know we and the world around us have been created, and thus are different from the Creator. The passage of time is not only what makes us aware of our creation, but grateful for it, because we're not here for very long, even if we live to be 100.

I'd think more about that, but I need to choose a pair of "dress pajamas" for the annual New Year's brunch at Slates. Here's to 2013.

Happy New Year's Eve

Celebrated: Around the world for 2012 years

Hi there.

You may remember me from earlier and more lively incarnations of this blog, such as "You Talking to Me?" and "Books I Kept." I've been away for a while, which is symptomatic of a year that got very small, very narrow, and very compartmentalized — just how small, narrow and compartmentalized I realized only when an old friend (who obviously hadn't checked the title page) sent me a copy of Books to Die For for Christmas, with a note that said it looked like a book I should have.

I can't do the usual summing-up and weighing of the year's gains and losses, because one recent loss overwhelms everything else that happened this year. I said goodbye to Dizzy, my faithful pointer mix, three weeks ago. He was 13, mostly blind, mostly deaf, and in pain that medications could no longer control. Worst, he'd stopped eating, and took treats only because the humans wanted him to. Letting him go was the right decision — especially this week, which is snowy and cold here, and would have been miserable for him — but he was the organizing structure of my life, and the beginning of the new year means building a new framework.

On balance, I'm glad to see the year go, and looking forward to some new starts in 2013. New goals, new routines, new adventures, and with luck a re-expansion of my world, and a reappearance of myself in it. The nature of my work is that if I do it well, I am invisible: my clients take center stage, and their words speak for themselves on the page. But that does not mean, should not mean, that I need to be invisible when I'm not working, and this year I forgot that.

Bringing the blog back is part of that, so here I am, and here I'll try to stay. I've been offline for the past few months because I seemed to have nothing to say other than, "I'm worried about my dog," and then, "I miss my dog." But 2013 needs to be about more than that, even if I have to make it up. Especially if I have to make it up, or at least remind myself that my life used to be bigger than that, and will be again.

Thanks for your forbearance while I work all this out.  I promise that the 2013 posts will be more entertaining, and less self-absorbed. Tune in tomorrow, please.

PS: Does anyone know the original source of the illustration above? It's the most-frequently posted response to a Google Images search for "Father Time," but the only credit line I've found just says it's a 19th-century image.

Happy Election Day

Celebrated: Across the United States on the first Tuesday of November

The polls in Gardiner don't open for another half hour or so, and I probably won't be there when they open, because the early voters need to get to work and I have all day to vote, if I want. Today my precinct is voting not only for President and U.S. Representative, but also for an open Senate seat (Olympia Snowe is retiring), State Senate, State Representative, District Attorney, several bond issues, and a referendum to allow same-sex marriage (Question 1).

Most of these aren't going to be close decisions in Maine, and I hope Question 1 won't be, either. The leading state Republicans have all declined to take a position on the issue, which I consider a very good sign: the arguments against this basic civil right sound bigoted and misguided, rooted in a willful disregard of the principle of separating church and state. It never ceases to amaze me that the most vocal proponents of Constitutional absolutism have no trouble skating right over the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

We ratified that amendment in 1868. It still took another 52 years to enact the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women's rights to vote, and another 45 years after that before the Voting Rights Act preempted state laws that effectively disenfranchised African-American voters throughout the South. Native Americans didn't have full voting rights across the country until 1968, when the Havasupai finally won the right to vote in Arizona and federal elections.

Although the media do their best to cover politics like a sporting event, the reality is that the business of self-government is tedious. It's hard, boring, detail-oriented work that requires balancing countless interests and egos, toward compromises that leave everyone feeling discriminated against. It's never a zero-sum game: sometimes it's more than the sum of its parts, but just as often it's less. It's inefficient and wasteful and frustrating.

It's also the price of freedom, and when it works there's absolutely nothing like it. Nothing, nothing feels as good as working together toward a common goal. It's why we play sports, it's why we form rock bands, it's why we put on plays and stage parades and organize flash mobs. We can't agree on everything, but we can agree on enough. We can agree that we're glad to be Americans, and we can all go vote today.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day

Celebrated: in the United Kingdom since 1605

On this date in 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, acting on orders from King James I, happened upon a Catholic mercenary named Guy Fawkes as he was leaving the cellars beneath Parliament. Behind Fawkes were several barrels of gunpowder, set to explode during the opening of Parliament that day, and thus intended to kill King James I and as many members of the House of Lords as possible. Fawkes and his co-conspirators believed that this would force the accession of James' daughter Elizabeth, only nine years old at the time, as a Catholic queen.

The Gunpowder Plot was actually led by an English Catholic named Robert Catesby, but Catesby managed to flee London after word of Guy Fawkes' arrest. He was shot three days later, at the head of a small group of rebels under siege at Holbeche House in Staffordshire.

So why, then, is this called Guy Fawkes Day instead of Robert Catesby Day? Well, he was the first one captured and identified; he was in charge of the gunpowder; he pled "not guilty" in a well-publicized trial (while Catesby never got a trial, being dead); but most memorably of all, he defeated his executioners by jumping from the scaffold rather than waiting to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

That execution happened on January 31, 1606, but on the night of November 5, 1605, King James I encouraged his subjects to celebrate his safety by lighting bonfires. The bonfire tradition continues to this day, and often includes the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy. Our use of the word "guy" to refer to any random man comes from these effigies; while the slang word originally meant an oddly-dressed person, it expanded to cover just about everyone.

James I, who was also James VI of Scotland, went on to rule Great Britain and Ireland for almost another 20 years, until he died of dysentery following a stroke at the age of 58. He oversaw not only the Golden Age of English literature, but also the beginning of the era of English colonization (the colony at Jamestown was named in his honor). He was also, not incidentally, the sponsor of the King James translation of the Bible. The Gunpowder Plot gave him an excuse to crack down hard on English Catholics, but he became more tolerant of both hidden Catholics and Puritans as his reign continued, which set things up nicely for the Civil War that deposed his son, Charles I, in 1642.

Happy All Souls' Day

Celebrated: by Catholics and other Christians, worldwide

I've been gone for a month, I know. Sorry about that, but what a month it's been. Thanks to everyone who gave me and Books to Die For shelter, sustenance and support, and most particularly to John Connolly, who was a friend before he was a client. He and Declan Burke have many reasons to be proud, not least of which is this review from yesterday's Washington Post, which pays the book the tremendous compliment of taking it as seriously as it deserves. Because in the end, isn't that the only thing that matters: to have someone pay attention, and take one's effort seriously? Attention must be paid, as the lady said.

The official name of this day, in the Catholic Church, is The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed. Yesterday was All Saints' Day; the promise of our faith is that we can all be saints, and therefore, as my old CCD teacher Sister Anne Matthew used to tell us, it is something we should all aspire to. But God's ways are not our ways, and because we cannot know what happens to us after death, we pray for the souls of the faithful departed — on this day, particularly, but every day, and not least because one day we'll be one of them. The prayer we say is simple and direct:

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Last week I was briefly in Quebec, a magical city I'd never visited before, and got to see Notre-Dame de Quebec, seat of the oldest Catholic diocese in North America. The cathedral, rebuilt in the 1920s, is a dazzling display of gilding and stained glass, but it was the ceiling that mesmerized me: a long panel of blue sky, with white clouds illuminated by an invisible sun. I couldn't find any public-domain photos to post here, but you can see other people's pictures of it here, here, and here. I toured the old city on a bright, sunny day, but what a magical thing that ceiling must be in the depths of a Quebec winter: the promise of sunshine, and warmth, and rest.

I've come down with a cold, the first in a year, and am rather terrifyingly behind on many different projects, so I apologize if you're waiting on something from me, and I'll get it to you as quickly as I can. The sun's come out after days of gray skies, and I have power, Internet and coffee, which is more than so many people have this morning.