Friday Jan. 2, 2015

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When the Fine Days

When the fine days migrate east from Ohio,
climbing Vermont’s greenest mountains and fording
              the Connecticut at White River
                            Junction; when our meadows take relief

from inversions and July’s lamentable
heat, you and I hike in fortuitous air
              up-mountain on logging roads—our dog
                            Max leading us, bouncing, looking back

with mild impatience, making sure we follow—
and kneel taking joy of tiny red blossoms
              in moss. Here are no snakes to beware;
                            here the shy black bear conceals himself;

here the glory of creation loosens our
spirits into appropriate surrender.
              Looking down past a clearing, we fill
                            with the fullness of the valley’s throat,

where the slow cattle grind the abundant grass
and their laboring stomachs turn green to white;
              where the fat sheep graze without budging,
                            like soft white boulders. Now Max settles

alert, his nostrils twitching to read calm air.
Let us descend, Camilla, to the long white
              house that holds love and work together,
                            and play familiar music on each

other’s skin. Today we won’t worry about
weather, depression, or war; about bad luck
              for our labors; about heart attacks
                            or metastasis to the liver.

“When the Fine Days” by Donald Hall, from The Museum of Clear Ideas. © Ticknor & Fields, 1993. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

It's the birthday of singer-songwriter Roger Miller, born in Fort Worth, Texas (1936). He was raised by his aunt and uncle in Erick, Oklahoma, after his father died and his mom couldn't support her three boys during the Depression. The family never had much money, and Miller grew up picking cotton and doing other chores around the farm. Singer and actor Sheb Wooley lived in the same small Oklahoma town, and married Miller's cousin. Wooley bought Miller his first fiddle, taught him guitar chords, and encouraged Miller's own show biz dreams. Impatient for success, Miller stole a guitar when he was 17. He repented and turned himself in the next day, and enlisted in the Army to avoid serving time. He served in the Korean War and later told people, "My education was Korea, Clash of '52."

He began his songwriting career in the late 1950s. He started recording his own material a few years later. He's best known for "King of the Road" (1965), but he also had No. 1 hits with "Dang Me" (1964) and "England Swings" (1966). He said that his favorite of all his songs was "You Can't Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd." He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995, three years after his death.

Today is the birthday of cartoonist and author Lynda Barry (books by this author), born in Richland Center, Wisconsin (1956). Her parents divorced when she was 12, and she started dropping acid. Four years later, she was working as a janitor seven nights a week. She beat her drug habit and finished high school. Her parents didn't come to her graduation. One standout memory from her childhood was reading Bil Keane's Family Circus comic, drawn in a distinctive circular panel. She was fascinated with Family Circus because the family it portrayed was so different from the one she knew. "It seemed like things were pretty good on the other side of the circle. No one's getting hit. No one's yelling," she remembered. After she started drawing her own comics, she met Bil Keane's son Jeff — who appeared in the strip as Jeffy — and promptly burst into tears. "I realized I had stepped through the circle. I was on the other side of the circle, the place where I wanted to be. And how I got there was I drew a picture."

She's the creator of Ernie Pook's Comeek, a weekly strip that ran in alternative newspapers for nearly 30 years. Her friend Matt Groening was also penning a strip called Life in Hell. He would later go on to create The Simpsons. The market for Barry's comic dried up in 2008, so she moved on to other projects. Now, she sells original artwork on the Internet and travels around the country giving workshops called "Writing the Unthinkable." She markets the seminars to nonwriters: "bartenders, janitors, office workers, hairdressers, musicians and ANYONE who has given up on 'being a writer' but still wonders what it might be like to write."

Barry is also the author of several books and graphic novels, including Cruddy (2000) and The Good Times are Killing Me (2002), which was also made into a play.

On this date in 1974, President Nixon signed a law setting the national speed limit at 55 miles per hour. The Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act was a response to an oil embargo put in place by the Arab members of OPEC — the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries — in protest of the United States' support of Israel. Gas prices went up 40 percent, block-long lines at the pumps were an everyday occurrence, and it wasn't uncommon to see signs reading "Sorry, no gas today" in front of your local filling station.

The western states, with their wide-open spaces and straight highways, complained bitterly about the new national law, but they complied. Gas prices continued to be high even after the embargo was lifted a couple of months later, and Americans began to look overseas, to Japanese cars that were smaller and more fuel-efficient.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®