OCTOBER 9TH -- MY BIRTHDAY

What is in a day?

“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. 

And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.”
- Maya Angelou



Denise Covey & Alyssa McKendry are two with whom I share a birthday.  

Have you ever wondered what people share your birthday?


What are their hopes, their dreams, their life situations, their locations on this war-torn world?

Would one of your "bad" days be Heaven to them?  

Did they go to bed hungry or swallow bitter tears before fitful sleep swept them up?


"Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time."
- Jean Paul Richter

"The old age of an eagle is better than the youth of a sparrow."
- Greek proverb


On this day in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" was published,

just two days after his death from mysterious causes and in odd circumstances, even for him --

 theories include political thugs, rabies, brain lesion, or the most likely, 

a final binge either chosen or forced upon him by brothers of his newly-betrothed, who viewed Poe's interest in their sister as opportunism.

Oddly enough, Edgar Allan Poe is a major character in my THE RIVAL 

with Alice Wentworth the inspiration for Annabel Lee:

  
Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim was published on this day in 1900. 

During a pause in Chapter 13, a French officer muses,  

“Mon Dieu! how the time passes!”; this prompts a reflection by Marlow, Conrad’s narrator: 


"It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts.

 Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome."


 In her Common Reader (First Series),  Virginia Woolf cites the above passage as representative of Conrad’s lasting worth:

"His books, with their air of telling us something very old and perfectly true, which had lain hidden but is now revealed, stir the mind…. 

Complete and still, very chaste and very beautiful, they rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way first one star comes out and then another."


Will any of our books touch the reader in a like way?  Should we strive to be a touchstone for the person holding our book?


Enough wool-gathering.  Let us end with George Burns' and Mark Twain's thoughts on birthdays:

“I was brought up to respect my elders, so now I don't have to respect anybody.”
- George Burns

"Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually age to 18."
- Mark Twain 

And don't forget:

 Victor Standish's latest novel can be purchased in Kindle format here.