want America to really be for everybody let us make it so
Can we not put our heads together and think and plan — not merely dream — the future America?
We do not want any secondary Americans.
We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy.
We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population.
We want America to really be America for everybody.
Let us make it so!
Langston Hughes, Speech at the Public Session of the Third American Writers’ Congress, Carnegie Hall, New York City, June 2, 1939. (Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)
Something about Mr. Hughes’ words remind of the words used in what some call The Birth Cerificate of the United States of America, otherwise known as the Declaration of Indepedence.
The words where Mr. Jefferson, with contributions from the rest of the Continental Congress, wrote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
They were saying …
We do not want any secondary Americans.
We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy.
We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population.
We want America to really be America for everybody.
Let us make it so!
And they put their heads together to think and to plan to make it more than a dream.
The future they saw would require … That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
… Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
… deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
… from the consent of the governed.
It is time for us, the governed, to show up and spell out what we consent to.
For myself:
I do not want any secondary Americans.
I do not want a weak and imperfect democracy.
I do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population.
I want America to really be America for everybody.
the sea answers all questions and always same way and saying: so soon?
The sound of the sea is the most time-effacing sound there is.
The centuries reroll in a cloud and the earth becomes green again when you listen, with eyes shut, to the sea —a young green time when the water and the land were just getting acquainted and had known each other for only a few billion years and the mollusks were just beginning to dip and creep in the shallows; and now man the invertebrate, under his ribbed umbrella, anoints himself with oil and pulls on his Polaroid glasses to stop the glare and stretches out his long brown body at ease upon a towel on the warm sand and listens.
The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way;
for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions
and the bickering
and the prognostications
and the turmoil,
the disagreements
and the fateful decisions
and agreements
and the plans
and the programs
and the threats
and the counter threats,
then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: “So soon?”
From the essay, On a Florida Key by EB White as published in The Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White ( Harper Colophon Book: New York, 1979).
your generation’s present is now another generation’s past
Adapted from the passage in Baseball in ’41 by Robert W. Creamer (New York: Viking, 1991) where Mr. Creamer writes:
Middle age begins, I think, when you first recognize that events in your generation’s present are now in another generation’s past.
I became aware that I was edging into middle age when I was thirty-two, in 1954, the year I began working for Sports Illustrated.
I had seen my first major league game in 1931, and the baseball of the thirties and forties had always been part of my present.
But in 1954 the thirties were suddenly a long time ago.
I met people on the staff — my contemporaries, I considered them, although they were ten years younger than I — who had few, if any, memories of the years before World War II.
I had become part of an older generation, unable to share personal memories of twenty years before.
Now I am pushing seventy, and the 1954 contemporaries are pushing sixty, and I still can’t share my prewar memories with them.
What did a kid of eight know about the world an eighteen year-old lived in during 1941?
There are relatively few people out there with whom I can share memories of that vivid year.
What gets under my skin right now is the thought that trying to explain to anyone pretty born this century is that … it didn’t use to be this way.
There were rules to how the Government worked.
Yes there were times when folks played fast and lose with those BUT for the most part, both sides played by the rules.
The rule book was laid out in the Constituion and both sides had a level of respect for the playing by the rules.
Along came this feller who depised rules.
Who broke the rules.
Who spit on the rules.
Who spit on those who expected others to play by the rules.
It didn’t use to be like this.
I have become part of an older generation, unable to share personal memories of twenty years before.
There are relatively few people out there with whom I can share memories of the way it used to be.
light, light glorifies … it transforms and ennobles … light is everything
Adatped from the line, “Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing ; light is everything.” written by Beligum Photograher Léonard Misonne as quoted in The Amateur Photographer’s Handbook by Aaron Sussman (Crowell: New York, 1962).
Coligny Beach – 10/16/2026 … High tide and low angled fall sun …
Light glorifies everything.
It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects.
The object is nothing;
light is everything.
Coligny Beach – 10/16/2026 … High tide and low angled fall sun … (In color) – Look at this photo for 10 minutes, and your mood will improve.
According to Wikipedia, “Léonard Misonne (1 July 1870 – 14 September 1943) was a Belgian pictorialist photographer. He is known for his landscapes and street scenes with atmospheric skies.
Misonne is best known for his atmospheric photographs of landscapes and street scenes, with light as a key feature, and as a pioneer of pictorialism. According to the Directory of Belgian Photographers, “Misonne’s work is characterised by a masterly treatment of light and atmospheric conditions. His images express poetic qualities, but sometimes slip into an anecdotal sentimentality.”
Léonard Misonne – Sea side … undated
I grew up in West Michigan, a place noted to be the 2nd most overcast location in the continental United States.
The Seattle area takes No. 1.
Lived in West Michigan for 50 years.
Fall was a nice time of year if you bought into the idea that fall was a nice time of year.
Cooler temps, warmer clothers and comfort foods of thick one dish stews and casseroles.
Comfort foods were necesssary because you knew it was coming.
Winter.
Winter and all the seasonal changes that meant.
But I am talking of something beyond seasons.
I am talking about just the sun.
Sunny days.
Here is some data for West Michigan:
Annual Cloud Days: Cities like Grand Rapids average about 205 cloudy days per year, placing them near the top of national lists for low-sunshine areas.
Winter Overcast Peak: January is historically the cloudiest month, with the sky remaining overcast or mostly cloudy roughly 69% to 70% of the time.
Summer Clear Skies: August is historically the clearest month, featuring clear, mostly clear, or partly cloudy skies around 67% of the time.
Annual Sunshine: West Michigan receives roughly 64 days of complete sunlight and around 96 days of partly sunny conditions per year, meaning less than half of the year experiences significant sun.
According to the same source, Weather Spark, Why West Michigan Is So Overcast is due to Lake-Effect Cloud Cover: Prevailing westerly winds pick up moisture and warmth as they travel across the relatively milder waters of Lake Michigan. When that air hits the colder landmass of West Michigan, it cools and condenses into a persistent low-level stratus deck.
Lets look at just this one stat.
Annual Sunshine: West Michigan receives roughly 64 days of complete sunlight and around 96 days of partly sunny conditions per year, meaning less than half of the year experiences significant sun.
64 days of complete sunlight.
But I had grown up with it.
Didn’t know no better.
Then a quirk of employeement moved me and my family to Atlanta.
Georgia has 110 clear days.
I found that the sunshine just made me feel better.
Then I moved due to another quirk in employeement, to the sea island coast of South Carolina.
216 sunny days a year and 149 partly sunny/mostly cloudy days.
The sun shines every day here.
I often say to friends and family who continue to embrace life up north, embrace the ‘seasonal’ change, the fall colors and rage cold, that Stalin sent people to Siberia … to punish them.
Light glorifies everything.
It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects.
way is in the sand flowing between shingle dune door opens and shuts
my way is in the sand flowing between the shingle and the dune the summer rain rains on my life on me my life harrying fleeing to its beginning to its end
my peace is there in the receding mist when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds and live the space of a door that opens and shuts
In Six Poems by Samuel Beckett as published in The collected poems of Samuel Beckett : a critical edition (New York: Graove Press, 2014).
According to Wikipedia, “Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet. Written in both English and French, his literary and theatrical works feature bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. As a key proponent of Irish literature, he is best known for his tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot (1953), and is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century, credited with transforming modern theatre. For his foundational contribution to both literature and theatre, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.”
That’s about all I know about Mr. Beckett.
About his famous play, Waiting for Godot, Wikipedia says, “In Waiting for Godot, the two main characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), spend their days waiting for someone named Godot, who they believe will provide them with salvation. They pass the time with conversations, physical routines, and philosophical musings, but Godot never arrives.”
What sticks in my mind is a night way back in history when I was sitting with my sisters and there were telling stories about being in Ann Arbor, Michigan and odd things that they experienced.
I was pretty young and waiting for my turn when I would leave home and ‘take my place’ at the family school in Ann Arbor.
The stories covered life in dorms, odd professors, odder students and food.
Then they got on the subject of what was known as the Grad Library.
The Grad Library was two buildings, one built in 1915 and designed by Albert Kahn, an aritect who designed almost every major building between Ann Arbor and the Detroit River.
It was a state of the art library where students requests books at the reference desk and library staff and only library staff entered the stacks that had thick glass flooring to let in as much light as possible.
Fast forward to 1970 and an 8 story modern building, built in what one of my Art History Professors called, The Late Ramada Inn Style was built behind the original Grad Library to hold what was called the world’s largest library collection of books.
The two buildings were cobbled together,
The floors didn’t line up.
It seems like the 4th floor was the same on either building but above and below the 4th floor you weren’t sure where you might end up.
Then you got into 4a and 4b and the basements and the subbasements.
The flooring had taped color coded lines that were supposed to help you find your way around but most folks figured the lines were there just to help you get lost.
Where am I going with this you ask?
As I remember it, my sister Janet had taken over the conversation and told a story of trying to find a certain book that had been recommend by a Professor.
You go in and you go down and you go around and you go up and find an elevator and you just keep going she said.
She was looking for this specific book and had written the location on a notecard back at the card catalog and I guess I should mention that the Library used Library of Congress filing, not Dewey Decimal, and that just added to the fun of finding a specific book.
My sister kept at it, down and around and bookcase after bookcase until, finally, she found the spot where the book should be.
There was a space.
There was no book.
But there was also a note taped to the shelf.
Janet held her breathe a moment then said … the note said, tell Godot, I left.
My sisters fell apart like this was the funniest thing they had ever heard.
I gotta find this library was what I remember thinking.
Post Script: I did find that library and it is a close to heaven on earth for someone like me and I experience the labryonth that it was of passage ways and hidden stairways and a 6 story stair well that you could scale (An experience that with today’s security cameras is no longer possible). But for the book, or play, I think I got a copy when I was too young and couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Maybe it is time to revisit?
One quote that was on the fringes of my memory comes to me for this day and age … and I had to look it up …
