| Diversity Visa
by Claudia Serea When it carried our lives inside,
how could the envelope be so small? We laughed and joked
that we'd sleep
under the Brooklyn Bridge. We'd eat a donut a day. We wondered if the New York streets
would be dirty and crowded,
and paved with dreams. Would there be dogs
with bagels up their tails? Would there be beautiful people
like in the movies? Or would our life be
a Seinfeld episode,
about nothing? Better poor in America
than in Romania, we said. Would you do it again? you ask. With you? I answer.
Anytime. “Diversity Visa” by Claudia Serea from Nothing Important Happened Today. Broadstone Books © 2016. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church on this date in 1521. Luther was a professor of biblical interpretation at the time in Germany, and he could find no text in Scripture that permitted the church to make money by selling indulgences for the forgiveness of sins. So he wrote up a list of 95 theses and distributed them among church leaders and friends, intending to spark a discussion of reform in the Catholic Church. The church started formal proceedings against Luther in 1519. It took some time for the commission to agree on whether his writings were heretical or not. Eventually, they decided that Luther was indeed guilty of heresy, and Pope Leo X issued a bull giving him 60 days to recant. Luther reacted by throwing the bull on a bonfire, so the Pope excommunicated him. It was on this date in 1777 that George Washington and his troops won the Battle of Princeton. Washington and his men had just won a surprising and decisive victory over British General Cornwallis at Trenton a week before. Cornwallis, stung by his loss, assembled 8,000 British soldiers to attack Washington's smaller army. Cornwallis left an additional 1,200 men behind to defend Princeton, and they departed on January 2, intending to crush Washington at Trenton. The British and the Continentals engaged in a few skirmishes, but darkness fell not long after Cornwallis arrived at Trenton, and so the battle was postponed until the following day. But in the night, Washington and his troops sneaked around behind Cornwallis's army and made their way to Princeton. He told 500 of his men to hang back, and they lit campfires and made noise so that Cornwallis wouldn't realize that most of the colonials had stolen away from their encampment. As for Washington and his men, the going was icy, and although the frozen ground made it easy to move the artillery, the horses and men kept losing their footing. As a result, they didn't arrive at Princeton until after daybreak, later than they'd planned. All told, 40 Continental soldiers and 275 British troops died in the battle. The British viewed this and the Battle of Trenton as minor American victories, but even so, they abandoned many of their posts in New Jersey, and ceded control of the region. The Continental army's morale was high after the Battle of Princeton, and they began to believe they would actually win the war. Today is the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien (books by this author), born in Bloemfontein, South Africa (1892). He studied classics, language, and literature at Oxford. In 1925, Tolkien returned to Oxford University as a professor. One day, while grading exams, he discovered that a student had left one whole page in his examination booklet blank. Tolkien, for reasons unknown even to him, wrote on the page, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." This single line turned into a bedtime story that he told his children, and from there, a book: The Hobbit (1937). Today is the birthday of women's rights reformer Lucretia (Coffin) Mott, born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in 1793. She went to public school in Boston for two years, and then, when she was 13, she enrolled in a Quaker boarding school near Poughkeepsie, New York. After two years there, she was hired on as an assistant, and then a teacher. She quit when she found out that she was being paid less than half of what the male teachers all made, simply because she was a woman; the experience sparked her first interest in women's rights. In 1811, she married fellow teacher James Mott, and the newlyweds moved to Philadelphia. Ten years later, she became a minister in the Society of Friends, as the Quaker church was called, and she was a popular public speaker on matters of religion and social reform. She was active in the abolitionist movement when she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton on a ship to London; both were on their way to the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. They were attending as delegates, but found that the convention would not let them speak because they were women; they were even seated in a separate area, behind a curtain. The two women resolved then and there to organize a convention for women's rights as soon as they returned home. It took eight years, but eventually they did: the Seneca Falls (New York) Convention of 1848. Mott wrote, "The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source." It was on this day in 1899 that The New York Times used the word "automobile" in an editorial, the first known use of that word in English. What would eventually come to be known as automobiles were still very new items, and the first mass production of them in America was two years away. The New York Times seemed equally disturbed by the machines themselves and the fact that there was no good word for them. It concluded: "There is something uncanny about these new-fangled vehicles. They are all unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good, or even an endurable, name. The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology if in nothing else, have evolved 'automobile,' which, being half Greek and half Latin, is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 