Three

Big Leather Couch

Mimi Writes

Late Bloomer Boomer

Second Effort

Damn that kind of worked in Blogger. It was fine in Word. Hyperlinks with one swipe, copy and paste. I’m supposed to put my blog URL after Second Effort, but that isn’t necessary as I’m not going to make anyone try to continue this blog chain letter. If you want to see the other blogs in the chain go to Second Effort, also found in the Recommended sidebar.

So here’s the deal. Curmudgeon of Second Effort did a post that required him to go to Wikipedia and find a holiday (Update: I just realized that while I wrote holiday, I just wrote about an event that wasn't a holiday, except maybe in the former USSR, below and I'm too lazy to change it) that occurred on, and two people who were born on his birthday and write something about the people and the holiday. Go read him. He’s a Windy City lawyer that writes pretty good. He “tagged” me to continue the theme.

I’m cheating for the first birthday. My birthday is October 4.

First Person”s Birthday.

Me. I was conceived in Alaska. My parents had landed there, after about a year long odyssey around the country, in a town along the coast called Seward. My Dad worked a fish processing plant. They learned that I was on the way and a doctor told them that I should best be born nearer to civilization.

That turned out to be near my father’s relatives in Ann Arbor, Michigan at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Upon their return to the home country, my Father got a job driving, here’s a blast from the past, a dry cleaning delivery truck. Other than my Father, I’ve never heard of anyone that has ever had this job. Milk yes; dry cleaning, no.

Anyway, back then they didn’t do Lamaze and breathing stuff. My Aunt took my Mother to the hospital because my Father and Uncle were working.

Turned out that I was a “blue baby.” In those days that was serious. Since I am writing this and you are reading this, it turned out OK. When my Father came to pick up me and Mom, the nuns presented him with a baptismal certificate, as I had been given the Last Rites of the Catholic Church, which apparently include the lesser included Rite of Baptism.

I grew up in a Lutheran family. Not just Lutheran, Missouri Synod, heavily German, Luther followers. The story gets murky here as I only got it from my Aunt who swore me to secrecy (all of the participants are gone to the great beyond, so I feel released from the vow.)

Short version. My Father pitched a fit, explaining that I was not a Catholic, I was a Lutheran. He wanted it reversed. I doubt he used the word annulled, but that would have been an acceptable result. Marriage is a Rite. If you can annul a marriage, you should be able to negate a baptism.

Anyway, the Nuns and the administrator who was summoned were unable to think of a reverse rite and we went to my first home with me being kind of a Catholic.

The next Sunday I became a Lutheran, baptized for the second time.

Event One.

OK here’s a throw in. 610 - Heraclius arrives by ship from Africa at Constantinople, overthrows Byzantine Emperor Phocas and becomes Emperor. That’s the first Wikipedia result for October 4. Just who knows that happened on that day? Have they adjusted for the change in calendar since then? And all that happened in just one day? Just asking.

1582 - Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian Calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year is followed directly by October 15. See, I told you. Pre-Gregory: Who knows which 10/4 Heraclius debarked on? Greg was the thirteenth Pope in the late sixteen hundreds? Lack of imagination.

OK, I’m accepting this one, and to give away my era, I was a little kid, but I remember this vaguely:

1957 - Launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. As I recall, and I may well remember this from later in school or a random History Channel documentary, this caused great alarm in our part of the world. We were hard into the early parts of the Cold War. How could the backward Ruskies beat us in to space? When did we launch Telstar, which inspired an insipid song?

One birthday and one event down. Back to Wikipedia.

I’m not happy with my choices. Roy Blount, Jr. shares my birthday, born in 1941. I like his humor.

Second Person’s Birthday.

My choice is an excuse to write about someone else: 1943 - H. Rap Brown, American civil rights activist. Brown had an influence on our society; but, another radical black civil rights activist had an influence on me:

Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was an author and a prominent American civil rights leader who began as a dominant member of the Black Panther Party.

His birthday is only thirty-four days before mine.

He did a lot of bad things. And then some more bad things. A good thing that he did was write a book called Soul on Ice while he was in prison, published in 1968. You need to forget that he confesses to rape, of black women, to practice for raping white women. Probably you should not forget that.

You can read it as an introspective view of black and white relations back then, and it will tell you some things. To my mind it is better read as a male’s confession of how he does not understand society, be society manifested in white people, women, institutions. He wrote the book with a lot of anger but his words are not just prose, there are passages that are poetry.

Now that I’ve written this, and not read the book in a couple of decades, I’m worried that my recollections are suspect. I’m going to go to Book Nook on North Druid Hills Road and buy it. Can’t cost more than a couple of bucks.

I probably should have put this higher in the post and the lighter stuff at the end. So, Curmudgeon, you going to tag me again?