Of course it was

It was on this day in 1892 that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited en masse for the first time, by more than 2 million students. It had been written just a month earlier by a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy…

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-82c?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Mary Oliver's canine pedagogy

 The Poetry Teacher

The university gave me a new, elegant
classroom to teach in. Only one thing,
they said. You can't bring your dog.
It's in my contract, I said. (I had
made sure of that.)

We bargained and I moved to an old
classroom in an old building. Propped
the door open. Kept a bowl of water
in the room. I could hear Ben among
other voices barking, howling in the
distance. Then they would all arrive —
Ben, his pals, maybe an unknown dog
or two, all of them thirsty and happy.
They drank, they flung themselves down
among the students. The students loved
it. They all wrote thirsty, happy poems.

https://voetica.com/poem/5712

Enterprise

Gene Roddenberry, the Star Trek cast and NASA administrators attended the rollout ceremony for the aptly named Space Shuttle Enterprise. 🖖🚀

https://www.threads.net/@roddenberryofficial/post/DABvyaGoPph/?xmt=AQGz53LUvM56968kDqz34zHQOsBncSSxbFkUW_x5G5EVeQ

If you build it…

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.

🇺🇸 has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, & erased again. But baseball has marked the time.

Legend. RIP James Earl Jones.

https://www.threads.net/@ben_verlander/post/C_trb85ygou/?xmt=AQGzAsWgVF7ItbNLSmDWlRXnKE4BoswG5_5UgbVbMChQEA

What Albert knew

I first heard this from deejay philosopher Chris in the Morning on Northern Exposure, c.1990.

"Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose ... There is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men ... upon whose well-being our own happiness depends." - Albert Einstein

https://www.threads.net/@alberteinstein/post/C_soOPsRGj1/?xmt=AQGzC6HwLudP8ct-vMpld3vt3UL6zK43qSldqmUWDtBI8Q

If I’d seen this when I was a kid…

Astronaut plays baseball by himself in space ⚾️

https://www.threads.net/@ikluqa/post/C_mr7NRRhLK/?xmt=AQGzTYk2G7FTXXWTVlP2X1Cw7ETJjZJNI_qRAZB1_5SJWA

Mary's dog Percy

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_i8fTgSnWk/?igsh=dHBlajF0eHp2MnM4

A perfect novel

John Williams's masterpiece Stoner (1965) "is something rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away," wrote Morris Dickstein in The New York Times. But Williams, born 102 years ago on this day, wasn't limited to the campus setting of his best-known work, exploring the dark side of the Old West in Butcher's Crossing (1960) and the Roman Empire in Augustus (1972).

hiddengems

https://www.threads.net/@libraryofamerica/post/C_QcJK3uwlC/?xmt=AQGzMoUeBW0sNzRlmlEZt29Mng02kCpbdAjyaiXjhW_kAQ

Shohei’s 🐕

Shohei Ohtani's dog, Decoy, threw the first pitch tonight 🐶

https://www.threads.net/@dodgers360/post/C_PJkttvQA7/?xmt=AQGzamUmAknZMLV6OmmZbdYJoRefFPnPer0dEfPbnH6PzA

Selves on shelves

This exactly captures my feeling about the value of a personal library (and a bit of my apprehension toward the time that's surely coming when I'll have to disperse it). When students tell me they don't read, I quote Mark Twain at them: the person who does not read possesses no advantage over one who cannot. 

Self-inflicted illiteracy makes such a needless waste of a mind.

==

My Bookshelf, Myself

To walk past the bookcases in our family's house is to make a different study of the history of time.

...When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.

By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read "A Brief History of Time" on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of "The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America," the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.

So when the schoolbooks came home from Haywood's classroom, all we could do was build more bookcases and shoehorn them into his home office. They are likely to be the last bookshelves we will ever build. There is no room in this house for more, and the next house will be smaller. Too small for all these books. Almost certainly too small for sentimentality in any form.

In the meantime, our books ensure that I am still surrounded by all the selves I have ever been, and all the selves my mate has been, and the selves our children were when we held them in our laps and read aloud from the poetry collection I gave my husband when our oldest son was on the way. In that book are some of the same poems my father read aloud to me as a child.

Just as she did then, just as she did again when our sons were young and again whenever anyone opens that book now, Emily Dickinson is right there explaining how a book is a chariot "That bears the human soul."

However capacious her own inimitable soul, Emily Dickinson could not have conceived of a book that exists in paperback, much less as an mp3 or digital download. Even recognizing them as books, I will always have trouble warming to such forms myself. I prefer the messy shelves, the dogeared pages, the notes inscribed in a familiar hand. Someday, long from now, a child may open a book of poems and find the note I wrote to her grandfather on the flyleaf: "For Haywood, to read aloud (beginning in about nine months)." Maybe she will save it, too.

Margaret Renkl, nyt