Yet another non-literary post from so-called Bookworm.
I took our dog to the vet yesterday morning to have a growth removed from her front leg. It was a small, benign growth; the main reason for removing it was because it itched and because if we didn’t remove it, it could, possibly, turn into something bad.
I learned last night that a very dear friend of my parents passed away on Friday. She was the mother of the Cool Older Girl who read Catcher in the Rye out loud to me. She died of complications from diabetes.
Stanislaw Lem died today.
For those not in the know, he’s a Polish sci-fi writer. His stories, the ones I’ve read anyway, are fairly straightforward spaceshippy stuff, but his style is literary and, well, inimitable. Here’s a taste to whet your appetite, the opening lines of the short story “Pirx’s Tale.”
Well, first of all, before I get off the topic of saints, I should mention that yesterday, May 19, was the Feast Day of my favorite one: St. Dunstan. I learned about him from my literary hero Robertson Davies, who writes about St. Dunstan in the Deptford trilogy. Which you should all go out and buy right now. Normally I’d say check it out of the library, but I know you will want to read this fifty times so you might as well buy it. Anyway, Saint Dunstan, a 10th century British monk, is famous for having tweaked the Devil’s nose with a pair of tongs. Because of the tongs — tongs! — he is the patron saint of smiths and jewellers. Oh, the mental image! And it’s played out very nicely in the third book of the trilogy, which is World of Wonders. And while you’re in the Robertson Davies section of the bookstore, you might as well get yourself copies of the Salterton and Cornish trilogies.
I heard about this guy on The Vinyl Cafe last weekend.
David Thompson, Canadian surveyor and explorer. He surveyed much of Canada — he logged thousands of miles, mostly on foot — and wrote about everything he saw. His surveying was so incredibly accurate and precise that you can go to the places he wrote about, stand there, look around, and see exactly what he saw. Stuart MacLean commented that Thompson must have been a remarkably honest man; a dishonest man would have fudged the figures.
I love being married to a high school social studies teacher.
Have you ever heard of Dr. John Snow, the father of public health? There was a cholera outbreak in London, ca. 1850. Cholera outbreaks were common in those days because of overcrowded living conditions and poor sanitation. This is pre-Pasteur. They didn’t know about microbes. They thought diseases were caused by miasmas, or poorly balanced bodily humours, or an angry God. But Dr. John Snow took it upon himself to go out into the field and do some research. He tracked down every case of cholera he could find, and figured out where the victim was when he or she first got sick. It turned out there was a huge cluster around the pump on Broad Street. Dr. Snow didn’t know that cholera is caused by water-borne bacteria. But he knew there was something wrong with the water from that pump. So he immediately went to the parish council and told them to take the handle off the pump. Even though he couldn’t explain why, he managed to persuade them to do it. And the epidemic ended.
I spent most of the afternoon at this woman’s memorial service. Mrs. Owen was my clarinet teacher. She taught me everything, starting with how to put the instrument together. “It’s been a long time since I’ve started from scratch,” I remember her saying at my very first lesson. She was a great teacher. Her students all got ones at Solo & Ensemble, and I was not the only one to win scholarships to music camp.
I wish I had known then what a remarkable woman she was. I knew vaguely that she had been in the U.S. Marine Band. In fact, I learned today, she was the conductor of the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve Band during World War II. There is no such band anymore; it existed only during that war. The band was formed so that the (male) members of the regular U.S. Marine Band could go off to fight. The Women’s Reserve Band played all over the country. They played for President Roosevelt and Admiral Chester Nimitz. Mrs. Owen was also the first woman to guest-conduct the all-male Marine Band. And here’s how she met her husband, to quote from the program at the service: “In 1945, Charlotte married Charles Owen, one of the three Principal Musicians of the US Marine Corps Band who had been sent to Camp Lejeune to help the women’s band get started.” A matter-of-fact sentence, but can’t you just imagine the romance? And here’s another thing: she turned down an officer’s commission because she wanted to continue living in the barracks with her sisters in the band. Someone ought to write a screenplay.
