Be Well, Do Good Work, and Keep in Touch

On this day in 1793, George Washington established the United States Post Office Department, in 1872, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public in Manhattan, and in 1877 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘Swan Lake’ premiered.  It’s also the birthday of photographer Ansel Adams.  And here’s a poem “Luke,” by Mary Oliver…..”

Every morning in the dark, even before I get out of bed, I read on my computer that day’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” by Garrison Keillor.  It’s also a radio program, and sometimes I listen to it at 9:01AM on my local National Public Radio station KAZU.  (Get it? Kazoo – it’s out of Santa Cruz.  Our other NPR station is KUSP.  We are so hip here on California’s Central Coast.) 

It’s fun to hear Keillor’s distinctive Minnesota voice, calm and slow, familiar from his other show,  “A Prairie Home Companion,” the old style variety show he’s been doing before a live audience on the radio Saturday nights for over 40 years.  While over 500 US radio stations (and many overseas) carry the two-hour “Prairie Home Companion,” just 100 run the 5-minute “The Writer’s Almanac.” 

Actually on the radio and in print he reads the poem first, and then gives little snippets about famous people born that day or interesting events of the day. (The above paragraph is The Writer’s Almanac’s Facebook page summary of last Thursday’s posting.)  Here’s what he went on to say about Ansel Adams:

Ansel AdamsIt's the birthday of Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco 11902). When he was 14, his parents gave him two gifts that changed his life. The first was a Kodak #1 Box Brownie camera. The second was a family trip to Yosemite National Park. He was so enchanted by the mountains and forest that he would return to the park every summer for the rest of his life. His photographs of Yosemite and other wilderness areas would become familiar to millions of people.

He said: "I hesitate to define just what qualities of a true wilderness experience are. Like music and art, wilderness can be defined only on its own terms. The less talk, the better."

Keillor signs off each day with his trademarked phrase, “Be Well, Do Good Work, and Keep in Touch.”

A lot of the funding for the show comes from the Poetry Foundation, a small Chicago based non profit that puts out a quarterly poetry magazine and awards poetry prizes every year.  The foundation and magazine were struggling mightily, as poets always do, until 2002, when philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the sole heir of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, gave it $100 million in stock.  That pays for a lot of poems, prizes and radio shows.  Next month, April, is National Poetry Month, and thanks to Ruth, we hear a lot more poetry and a lot more about National Poetry Month these days.  (She was of the same era (died 2009) as the equally generous and surprising Joan Kroc, whom I wrote about almost a year ago, another independent-minded very generous woman.)

Ruth LillySometimes the fun of the show is the juxtaposition of different events on the same day: Garrison told us that March 1 is the birthday of poets Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur and novelist Ralph Ellison.  Plus Yellowstone was named a national park that day.  Lying there in bed in the dark I learned a little bit about each writer and about how President Ulysses S. Grant set aside 2 million acres on March 1, 1872 as the world’s first national park. 

That got me thinking about my visit to Yellowstone in 1961 when I was 10 years old and on a trip “out west” with my parents.  My first airplane flight.  My first bear.  My first geyser, “Old Faithful.” 

After breakfast I looked for my old college lit copy of  “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison which I read 10 years after my Yellowstone trip.  A different America.  Here’s what Keillor says about Ellison:

And today is the birthday of novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison (books by this author), born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1914. He was the grandson of slaves, and he originally wanted to be a classical composer, but when he met the great African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, the encouraged him to become a writer instead.

Ralph EllisonOne day, while recovering from a bad kidney infection on his friend's Vermont farm, Ellison was sitting in the bard with a typewriter. He stared at it for a while, and then suddenly typed the sentence "I am an invisible man." He didn't know where it came from, but he wanted to pursue the idea, to find out what kind of a person would think of himself as invisible. It took him seven years to write the book, and it was the only novel published in his lifetime. It was Invisible Man, published in 1952. After he finished his first novel, he worked for the rest of his life on his second, but never finished it. That book, published posthumously, was Juneteenth (1999). He also published two essay collections: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). 

It’s nice to begin the day with the gift of a poem.  In the Mary Oliver poem he read last week she describes in her simple rich style her happy curious dog Luke, and ends with the haunting lines: “we long to be – that  happy – in the heaven of earth – that wild, that loving.”

As I went though my day I kept thinking of Old Faithful at Yellowstone. I tried to notice everyone I encountered, not treat anyone as invisible. And I longed to be wild and loving.

Thanks Garrison.  I’ll keep in touch.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter