| Wishing for Lake Superior
by Deborah H. Doolittle In the summer time, when the ferries
took us out to the islands
and the loons dove and laughed in our wake,
that is where I'd like to be. Or, more importantly, when I'd like
to be, which was seventeen
and Duluth, the big city with shops
and bars I wanted to visit, was across the state line and one year
in my future. We had packed
our hopes and fears along with our gear,
camped within sight of the shore, cooked huge one-pot meals on the campfire
and snuggled deep in our tent,
watching the Big Dipper slowly turn
in the screen vents over our heads. With the transistor radio tuned
to whatever rock and roll
station with a strong enough signal,
we'd sing along with the songs and eat blueberries and Oreos.
We'd made plans for the future
we thought we could see as clearly as
the bright beams from our flashlights. That summertime, when each single day
inched its slow way into night,
and then another day, with nothing
better to do than remember. “Wishing for Lake Superior” by Deborah H. Doolittle. Reprinted with permission of the poet. On this date in 2004, a tsunami devastated coastlines along the Indian Ocean. It was triggered by an earthquake in the middle of the ocean, 160 miles west of Sumatra. With a magnitude of between 9.1 and 9.3, the quake was the third strongest ever recorded on a seismograph, and it lasted for up to 10 minutes. It occurred when pressure built up along a 600-mile fault line between two tectonic plates to such a degree that one plate slipped underneath the other. The quake occurred in relatively shallow water, which meant that the energy was not dispersed as much as it would have been in deeper seas. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the quake released energy equivalent to 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. The quake was so powerful that it vibrated the whole planet and actually changed the Earth’s rotation very slightly. The shifting of the plates raised the sea floor by about 10 yards, and this displaced massive amounts of water. The tsunami chain that this generated reached the Sumatra coast within 15 minutes. The waves — which started small but grew as high as 50 feet — wiped out whole villages in seconds. The tsunami even claimed lives in South Africa, up to 3,000 miles away from the epicenter of the quake. An estimated 230,000 people from 14 different countries died; half a million more were injured. Five million people required humanitarian aid. A ship weighing almost 3,000 tons was thrown almost a mile inland, where it remains a tourist attraction in Indonesia. But there were very few animal casualties; many people reported seeing animals fleeing for higher ground just minutes before the tsunami struck. Two years after the quake and tsunami, the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System went into operation, and it was successfully put to the test in 2012, when more quakes hit the Indian Ocean. It was on this day in 1944 that Tennessee Williams’s (books by this author) play The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago. It was his first major play. Williams called The Glass Menagerie his “memory play,” and he based the characters loosely on himself, his sister Rose who struggled with mental illness, and their mother. In the play, the siblings’ mother Amanda is desperately trying to find a beau, a “gentleman caller,” for her fragile daughter, Laura. Williams was an obscure playwright, but his agent managed to convince a man named Eddie Dowling to take on the play as its director, producer, fundraiser, and star. She also convinced the once-famous Laurette Taylor to come out of retirement and accept the role of Amanda. The entire cast drove Williams crazy, especially Taylor, who kept making up lines. A week before opening night, they had a screaming match in which Taylor told Williams that he was a fool and that playwrights made her sick. Opening night was a failure — people didn’t want to go out the day after Christmas, and there was a terrible blizzard. By the following afternoon, the box office had made just $400 and the company was writing up its closing notice. Luckily for Williams, famed theater critic Claudia Cassidy had been in the audience and published a glowing review in the Chicago Tribune. She and a coworker championed the play, the mayor of Chicago offered half-price tickets to city employees, and by mid-January it was a hit and went on to a successful Broadway run at the end of March. On March 8th, Williams wrote to a friend: “‘The menagerie’ is no lie about this company — and neither is glass! I sometimes wonder if we’ll all really get to New York in one piece. The play backstage is far more exciting than the one on!” It’s the birthday of American humorist David Sedaris (books by this author), born near Binghamton, New York (1956) and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. At 20, Sedaris was hitchhiking and picking apples, sometimes renting a room in a boardinghouse. He began keeping a diary because he had no fixed address for people to write to him, so he simply began writing to, and for, himself. He finished his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he’d begun making his classmates laugh with funny stories during painfully silent critiques. He thought, “I could make this work.” He mucked about, painting apartments, squirrel-proofing homes, and working as house cleaner while he read his bits at night in Chicago clubs. Ira Glass, the host of public radio’s This American Life, discovered him (1992) and was so charmed by Sedaris that he invited him to read an essay called “The SantaLand Diaries” on Glass’s show. Sedaris read the piece, which concerned his time working as Crumpet the Elf at Macy’s in New York during Christmas season, in his trademark deadpan voice. His appearance was so popular that Glass made him a regular, and Sedaris was offered a publishing contract soon after. Sedaris’s books include Naked (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013), and most recently Calypso (2018). There are over 10 million copies of Sedaris’s books in print. On writing, he says: “Write every day and read everything you can get your hands on. Write every day with a pen that’s shaped like a candy cane.” Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 