Time for a spring break
April showers bring flowers. Also income tax. It’s spring, so it’s Passover, Palm Sunday, Easter, Lent, Good Friday, end of Ramadan, big rain, that stupid changing the clock thing, Buddha’s birthday and whatever’s Dandelion Day.
Don’t ask me any questions. I’m lucky I know this.
In Rao’s a group celebrating whoknowswhat invested in the jukebox. Came on was some voice that passed away long before Lafayette’s arrival in America. One young 60ish thing hissed, “Let’s have no more of that now.”
April’s a hotshot month. Everyone’s celebrating something. On the 17th — who knows what year, I couldn’t read the writing — came use of Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph, written at age 22. Also this month, 1859, “A Tale of Two Cities” was published.
Back aways one April some famous name published an English language dictionary, burbling, “They’re like watches. The worst is better than none.”
And Emily Dickinson’s brief career began when she was 31. She’d sent four of her poems one April to a favorable critic who liked them.
Ohh, I feel so wretched now that MSNBC has shrunken its voices. (Obviously its mental state as well.) Its English language penmanship as well. Also, who needs calligraphy or penmanship anymore? Forget college. All you need is a charger and a nice crayon. Just remember how Oscar Wilde once knocked another writer: “It was much worse than being immoral. It was badly written.” While he was up on libel charges.
April 1871, Robert Louis Stevenson tells his father he’s quitting university. His life, he says, “will be in writing.” Another April, a pilot of steamboats in the St. Louis district, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), gets licensed up or down or across to officially pilot a Mississippi River steamboat. Shakespeare gets baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Maybe not everyone cares but I thought you’d also like to know that Alice B. Toklas was born this month in what used to look like San Francisco. April 1844 during a trip near Concord, Henry David Thoreau accidentally set fire to the woods, burnt 300 acres and caused fortunes in damages. April 1882, his buddy Ralph Waldo Emerson leaves us forever in Concord one month before his 79th birthday.
In 1945, Ezra Pound is handed to the US Army by Italian patriots. April 18, 1958, DC federal court decides he cannot be held any longer for treason. Newly released, he’s asked: “So how did it go?” His answer: “Badly. But what other place could anyone live in America.”
America. Crown thy good with brotherhood. Land of the free — home of the craven. Be it known that two big corporations may soon be interviewing kindergarten Bidens. Their names? American Express and Visa.