When I saw my first old-fashioned iris of the season last Sunday I thought of my mother. And the great educator and civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune. And the lessons flowers teach us about how to change the world.
My post from 2024 begins, as so many do, early in the morning.
On my daily walk in Silver Spring I came upon a tiny handmade sign among some flowers. Since it is my custom to always read the plaque, I stopped to investigate.
The little plaque reads:
“I have had more than half a century of such happiness. A great deal of worry and sorrow, too, but never a worry or a sorrow that was not offset by a purple iris, a lark, a bluebird, or a dewy morning glory.”
Followed by the name and dates of the author:
Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875-1955
And as I looked up, I noticed that it sat among a stand of beautiful irises in full bloom.
I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the old-fashioned iris. They were my mother’s favorite flower, and we always had some in our backyard on East Main Street. So I’m glad to know that I share at least one thing with the great educator and civil rights pioneer Mary McLeod Bethune.
“The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune became one of the most important Black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century. The college she founded set educational standards for today’s Black colleges, and her role as an advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave African Americans an advocate in government . . .
Mary McLeod Bethune (credit: National Women’s History Museum)
A champion of racial and gender equality, Bethune founded many organizations and led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in 1920, risking racist attacks. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and in 1935, she became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune also played a role in the transition of Black voters from the Republican Party—“the party of Lincoln”—to the Democratic Party during the Great Depression. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1936, Bethune became the highest ranking African American woman in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, where she remained until 1944. She was also a leader of FDR’s unofficial ‘black cabinet.’ In 1937 Bethune organized a conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, and fought to end discrimination and lynching. In 1940, she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), a position she held for the rest of her life. As a member of the advisory board that in 1942 created the Women’s Army Corps, Bethune ensured it was racially integrated. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Bethune was the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. She regularly wrote for the leading African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender.“
In addition to being a civil rights pioneer and educator, Bethune was a businesswoman who has been honored with a memorial statue, a postage stamp, and—in 2022—she became the first African American to be represented with a state statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol.
It gives me great joy to know that such an amazing and transformational leader took the time to stop and admire the iris. And a dewy morning glory.
Our first iris of 2026, on the church grounds at St. Alban’s parish in DC
The essay from Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency Substack looks at the power of flowers to change behavior. She writes that power, at its most essential, is “the ability to influence an outcome on any or all scales, to protect one’s own at a minimum and to influence, even control others at a maximum.” Violence is constantly misunderstood as power, she adds.
“Botanist David George Haskell‘s new book How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries describes a kind of power often ignored or dismissed, just as flowers themselves are. He writes, ‘When flowers arrived, they upended and transformed the planet. They were late arrivals on the world stage, appearing about two hundred million years ago, long after the evolution of complex animals and other land plants. By one hundred million years ago they were the foundation of most habitats on land . . . We often think of power and revolution as about control, authoritarianism, and violence. Might makes right. But that’s not the only way in which revolution and power and transformation take place. Flowers offer a different narrative. They changed the world in revolutionary ways through cooperation, through collaboration, often mediated by beauty, by sensory experiences. So a flower is quite literally speaking to the sensory system of a bee or of a hoverfly or of a bird to draw that animal in to establish a cooperative relationship, a reciprocal relationship. And we’re just the latest animal to become enchanted by the flowers and to become loyal collaborators with the flowers.’”
After exploring the current administration’s misunderstanding of what makes power, Solnit moves to her closing.
“The lesson flowers offer is that when you treat others well, when you meet their needs, you can enter into relationships that serve you as well as them. When you use violence or otherwise exploit and coerce to get what you want, you create adversaries, not allies, and they too often turn out to have power. In a world of increasing equality over the past few centuries, cooperative power matters more, and violence, [as Jonathan Schell in his landmark book from 2003, Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People points out], has become an increasingly weak way to get what you want . . .”
Flowers provide happiness. They also change the world.
With the ending of Lent and the beginning of Eastertide I have found myself reading the works of several writers and considering their perspectives on life, death, darkness, light, resurrection, and love.
As winter turns to spring we are very much aware of both darkness and light. There are, of course, many types of darkness: the absence of light, chaos, evil, oppression, despair, perhaps even death. Mark Randall James, however, suggests that darkness “is never more than a beginning.” In the coming of spring, as in the biblical story, there is a direction, “a movement from evening to morning, darkness to light, seed to fruit, promise to fulfillment.”
To participate in a group discussion I recently reread a work on life and death, heaven and hell, light and darkness by perhaps the best-known Christian apologist of the twentieth century. It is one of a number of books by C.S. Lewis I first read forty or fifty years ago. Returning to read it now, with the perspective of time and experience, was a reminder that not every author we follow in our youth travels with us throughout life.
The Great Divorce (1945), by C.S. Lewis is at its base a Christian allegorical tale about a bus ride from hell to heaven. This is the book where Lewis first introduces the revolutionary idea (for some) that the gates of hell are locked from the inside. Amazingly, Lewis tells us, anyone who wants to stay in heaven can. “If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven,” Lewis insists. Without getting too deep into questions of judgement, let me just say that I agree with his perspective. Returning to this work written more than 80 years ago, however, I found myself underwhelmed. The tale itself was not particularly compelling. From my perspective the book works somewhat better as a meditation upon good and evil, grace and judgment. But I should note that many online commentators have found the author’s descriptive powers and storytelling ability changed the way they think about good and evil and our ability to navigate this world.
My affinity for Lewis’s writings—with the exception of his Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels—has lessened considerably over the decades. I have issues with some of these early works where Lewis famously gives up his atheism and writes, at least to my ear, with a certainty that is all too prevalent with recent converts.
Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm is not entirely the fault of Lewis.
Many conservative believers have laid claim to Lewis’s work and pushed them as a way of supporting their rigid theological framework. Their voices are loud and numerous, even though they gloss over significant differences between their religious worldviews with the Oxford professor. Lewis believed in biblical myth and he wrote about inspiration as opposed to inerrancy. Both beliefs, in the view of many conservatives, are wrong.
I believe in the continuation of life after death but have stopped focusing on what comes next in some great beyond. For me The Great Divorce was neither as compelling nor genuinely human as a Lewis book written in 1961 following the death of his wife, the American poet Helen Joy Davidman.
A Grief Observed is brief, poignant, and honest. Lewis works through the darkness that is the loss of love, meaning, and faith, and chronicles the efforts to regain his footing in this world. It is highly personal, so much so that author Madeleine L’Engle writes in a thoughtful foreword that Lewis’s writings on the topic helped her understand that each experience of grief is unique. Still, there is a universality to the book as well, as what Lewis describes feels so much like what so many went through in our recent pandemic period of mass death worldwide. A Grief Observed is focused on one man and woman and—at the same time—all men and women.
The earlier book is, of course, an allegory. But in A Grief Observed Lewis has no time for euphemisms and mushy thinking.
No one can say with certainty what happens after we pass (to use the old Southern phrase I like best) which is why I do not spend a great deal of time focusing on the afterlife as opposed to the one life I have to live right now. As for what comes next, L’Engle notes in her commentary on Lewis’s journal that “[t]he important thing is that we do not know. It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.”
Other writers I follow have things to say about death, life, darkness, light, resurrection, and love . . . which seems important in challenging times. They don’t all agree, but they will make you think.
“What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death. Jesus walks the way of death with love, and what it becomes is not death but life. Surprise of surprises! It doesn’t fit any logical explanation. Yet this is the mystery: that nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love. ”
The Resurrection by the evangelical Frederick Buechner can be a bit “Presbyterian” for my tastes, but I do appreciate the way he points out the difference in the accounts, for instance, of the birth of Jesus and his resurrection.
“[W]e can say that the language in which the Gospels describe the Resurrection of Jesus is the language of poetry and that, as such, it is not to be taken literally but as pointing to a truth more profound than the literal. Very often, I think, this is the way that the Bible is written, and I would point to some of the stories about the birth of Jesus, for instance, as examples; but in the case of the Resurrection, this simply does not apply because there really is no story about the Resurrection in the New Testament. Except in the most fragmentary way, it is not described at all. There is no poetry about it. Instead, it is simply proclaimed as a fact.”
Easter Begins in the Dark by Episcopal priest Mark Randall James reminds us that God’s grace, since the beginning of time, has been there brooding over the darkness and the deep, preparing the way, planting seeds.
“Easter begins in the dark because it is the dawn of the new creation—and according to Genesis, creation itself begins in darkness. The light is not the first act of creation; the formless void, the chaos of the waters, also comes from God. That is why, there in the darkness, the Spirit of God was ‘hovering over the waters,’ or as some translate it, ‘brooding,’ like a mother hen (Genesis 1:2). There in the darkness of primordial chaos, God was already quietly at work, preparing to bring creation into the light.”
This excerpt is from Mark’s recent Easter Vigil sermon. I was immediately taken with his focus on the importance of darkness as he delivered it from the pulpit at St. Alban’s parish as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning. The entire piece is worth your time.
“By upending the conventional notion that death is the great threat and resurrection the great hope, Julia Esquivel opened my mind and heart to a hard truth: figurative forms of death-in-life can give us a perverse sense of comfort—while resurrection, the promise of new life, can feel threatening.”
Finally, I have returned to read some of the daily meditations of Madeleine L’Engle in her Glimpses of Grace. I am much more in tune these days with her way of looking at the world, with its different concept of time and her focus on wonder and love.
“L’Engle celebrates the Incarnation, the power of music, doubt as a doorway to truth, stargazing as a glimpse of God’s glory, stories as midwives to our wholeness, the interdependence of all living beings, and much more. Best of all, she affirms the virtues of imagination, intuition, and intelligence.”
Imagination, intuition, intelligence. All are gifts of creation to be used as we focus on the one life we have to live.
More to come . . .
DJB
Angel of Grief by W.W. Story (photo from the Protestant Cemetery in Rome by DJB)
Tom Piazza creates an intimate portrait of one of the most beloved singers and songwriters of our times.
When America lost one of its greatest songwriters to Covid-19 in April of 2020, I wrote that his grieving fans would have to be content with what is, by any definition, an amazing body of work.
Live performances and recordings over a five-decade career will always form the heart of what we remember about John Prine. But as the artist’s widow Fiona writes in the foreword, a new book by a talented author, musician, and storyteller “is now a valuable, and unique, part of the legacy of our beloved John.”
Living in the Present with John Prine (2025) by Tom Piazza was to be Prine’s memoir. But after the songwriter’s untimely death it became an intimate and personal narrative of the artist’s last few years. In a series of road trips, late night jam sessions, meals enjoyed in John’s favorite diners, and interviews, Piazza succeeds in capturing Prine’s unique voice. As fans we have heard this voice most frequently in his unforgettable songs. The joy of this new work is that we now experience John’s take on life in his everyday speech and off-hand remarks.
Piazza notes that Prine’s mind worked allusively, making connections through images and rhythms. John always lived in the present. “The moment was what mattered. He also had a strong sense of the finitude of it all,” which perhaps explains why he valued the present so much. “Part of that sense of the present was the fact that in any relationship, sooner or later, one of you would be saying goodbye.” In the end, Piazza has written a beautiful and personal work about friendship, love, and loss.
The book is not a biography although Prine does talk about his early years growing up in Maywood, Illinois, and visiting his parents’ families in western Kentucky. His origin story could come from a classic Prine song but Piazza only briefly mentions it here. John was a postman who wrote during his breaks. On a dare from friends (and under the influence of a few beers) he stepped up to an open mic and sang Sam Stone, Hello in There, and Paradise, three songs, any one of which most songwriters would have given their left arm to have written. A young Roger Ebert wrote his first music review of Prine performing in 1970 at the Fifth Peg in Chicago. In that review, he noted that “He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.” Kris Kristofferson stopped by to hear him play one night after the bar had closed. Prine pulled out his guitar, played seven songs, and Kristofferson asked him to play all seven again. Then he helped him get his first record deal and wrote the liner notes for his first album, where he memorably noted that Prine was “Twenty-four years old and writes like he’s two-hundred and twenty.”
Piazza joins the story in 2018, when Prine is an established and beloved figure in American life. With an opportunity to write an article for the Oxford American, Piazza and Prine begin to hang out, find mutual loves and connections, sing songs, and become friends. Over the next two years they see each other at various points on the map and add rich textures and compelling stories to their relationship. Prine, who had always said he never wanted to write a memoir, surprises Piazza by asking him to collaborate with him on writing one. They begin that task in February of 2020 with two days of interviews. Another session is planned for two weeks later but has to be postponed. Six weeks after that, on April 7, 2020, John died of complications from Covid-19. It has taken Piazza five years to come to the place where he could write this work.
“I told you I know how to waste a day,” Prine tells Piazza after a road trip to Sarasota in his ’77 Coupe de Ville where they buy shoes, reminisce about John’s first meeting with Bob Dylan, and eat the Granny Smith apple tart with an extra scoop of vanilla ice cream that John orders at lunch. That vibe runs throughout the book. So many of Prine’s songs are about connections—especially missed connections. “There is a yearning and a degree of melancholy inside all the wryness and brilliance of the lyrics.” Prine focuses on living in the present because he doesn’t want to miss those interactions with people he encounters, people he loves.
The book is full of little gems that capture a life well lived.
John tells about his seventeen-year-old Mexican girl friend. He was twelve at the time but somehow he “got the cojones to call her up and ask her for a date and she accepted!” He loved the whole family. “Her mother was five-foot-nuthin’ and had tortilla dust all over her.”
Then there is this story from early in his career.
“I did a big talk show in the seventies in Dublin, which was like the fifties anywhere else. The people wore cardigans—they looked like Mister Rogers. It was my first time playing Dublin. The show was on every night, like The Tonight Show. The other guests on the show were Brendan Behan’s mother, a defrocked bishop, and Freddy the Organ Grinder, with his monkey. Off the streets of Dublin! And I sang ‘Sam Stone.’ Brendan Behan’s mother and the bishop drank a whole bottle of port and got soused in the green room while I sang ‘Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose,’ to all the Catholics in Ireland . . .”
John convinces the legendary Sam Phillips to come out of retirement to produce his album Pink Cadillac. His record company hated it. Robert Palmer, in the New York Times, wrote the album’s only positive review. “Rolling Stone said it sounded like the drunks were recording on shoeboxes.”
There are countless stories about John and Cowboy Jack Clement, another legend in the Nashville music business. “Cowboy’s business was fun . . . If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing our jobs.”
I could go on and on.
Jason Wilber, John’s lead guitarist for twenty-four years, said,
“He was unflappable; he didn’t get ruffled for no reason. I feel like one of the things I learned from him is you have all these opportunities to just be nice.”
John’s older brother Dave put it best. “If John Prine’s songs don’t get to you, you are dead. Or you have been lobotomized! Or you’re just not paying any attention.”
The music critic Jayson Greene wrote a 2018 profile in Pitchfork that put John’s appeal this way.
“Prine grew up in the Midwest, and his songs are full of very white, Middle-American sounding folks, people with names like Donald and Lydia and Loretta and Davy who drive trucks and serve in the Marines. But he doesn’t fetishize the lives of those he grew up around, or blow them up into gaudy myth like Springsteen. The people in his songs are never allegories for his own thoughts; they are just people, living with their own complications, and Prine takes pains to get them just right. In his songs, life is one long exercise in ambivalence, and the only honest point of view is a squint.”
John Prine was all about the details of life in a world that was cruel at times, but also where love shows through. And those details often focused on the everyday . . . until he spun them around through his quirky sensibility to see the wonder around us.
Tom Piazza has written a heartfelt portrait that is full of those loving, quirky and wonder-filled details of life. Fans of Prine—and we are legion—should be grateful.
More to come . . .
DJB
NOTE #1: If you want to see Prine performing in these later years, I recommend you find the time to watch one of the best: an intimate concert from 2019 on The Strombo Show. Gordon Lightfoot, who is one of John’s songwriting heroes, sits in the front row enjoying it as much as anyone, and you can watch him sing along with the familiar chorus of Far From Me: “Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle / looks just like a diamond ring.” John also does a bit of mouth music in the song Crazy Bone and then says, “Please don’t mistake that for scat singing, that’s my shaving song in the morning. Somewhere between Popeye and Fred Flintstone.”
Classic.
NOTE #2: As fate would have it, three weeks before John’s death I happened to write about Prine and his music—before the world learned he was suffering from the symptoms of Covid-19—in a piece entitled The timeliness and timelessness of John Prine. It just seemed to be a good time to recall the work of the man who wrote the classic line, “To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”
I didn’t realize how timely that post would be.
For other MTC posts about Prine’s music and legacy see:
Arthur C. Brooks looks at how to face, and perhaps even thrive, in the midst of the inevitable.
In recent years I’ve taken to reading works in a variety of genres that cover a wide range of topics. But I recently noticed that I have stopped reading in an area that was once a staple of my literary diet: self-help books.
There’s a formulaic feel to these works that began to feel repetitive. Plus, in my experience they tend to take a few good ideas and then generate enough words and anecdotes so that one has to slog through 250 pages for what should have been a good New Yorker article or a Ted Talk.
When one of my book groups chose to read a work that promised to serve as a guide to “transforming the life changes we fear into a source of strength” I was skeptical. But book clubs are about tackling works that perhaps you wouldn’t choose to read on your own, so I jumped in.
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in The Second Half of Life (2022) by Arthur C. Brooks begins with the premise that too many of us believe that the more successful we are the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. But Brooks asserts that our belief in our ongoing relevance simply isn’t true. Aging, and decline, are inevitable. For many successful adults, facing this fact is painful. A social scientist and “one of the world’s leading authorities on human happiness,” Brooks chronicles his own journey, beginning at age 50 at the height of his career, to see if he could transform his future from disappointment to an opportunity for progress in new and unexpected ways. Depending on your perspective and personal experience, he either succeeded or simply finally found wisdom about the world as it works that many intuitively know or find through family, experience, or faith without having to read a self-help book.
Brooks is a good writer who raises intriguing points. Early on he notes that too many of us don’t recognize how early decline actually begins in our professional and personal lives. Surveys have shown that Americans believe “being old” means that you are “turning eighty-five.” In other words, the average American (who lives to be seventy-nine) dies six years before entering old age. But if we are being honest with ourselves we know that our memory begins to slip in our 50s, our physical plant begins to need repairs at about the same age, and things we once did with some ease—such as multi-tasking—become difficult if not impossible.
Over the course of 200+ pages, Brooks works through ways to move from one strength (the striving self) to another (such as the teaching/mentoring self). He asks his readers to ponder their death. Then he goes into a bit of real self-help mumbo jumbo when he travels to India to meet with a Hindu guru he’s been following for years. I found one of the more useful chapters to be his exhortation to make your weakness your strength. I agree that we really only connect with others through our weaknesses. More importantly, in telling Stephen Colbert’s story of “how he learned to love the thing that I most wish had not happened”—in Colbert’s instance when his father and two brothers died in a plane crash when he was ten—he addresses a fundamental truth of how life is really lived. In an interview Anderson Cooper asked Colbert to clarify that statement and his response is very instructive.
“It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. I don’t want it to have happened . . . but if you are grateful for your life . . . then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.”
Brooks ends by discussing the fact that the transitions he went through and those traveled by other successful, striving individuals are liminal in nature. We look up and the path forward is no longer straightforward. He has suggestions for “good liminality” (a phrase I instinctively hated) that in many ways boil down to learning a new set of life skills. After some theology (he was president of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute for a while, so the trad-Catholic approach fits), Brooks encourages his readers to put their love not on things but on people and, ultimately, the divine.
Some of our book club members found the perspective in From Strength to Strength persuasive. I told the group that I had learned many of these lessons a long time ago from my father. When it came to career and then retirement, my father taught us not to be defined by our jobs. He was proud of his career as a TVA engineer, yet he retired in his early 60s and easily moved on. Tom Brown enjoyed life. Every day was a new day.
I have been thinking more about liminal spaces in recent years, and I think we can all embrace the liminality in life. Poet and songwriter Carrie Newcomer talks about living in the in-between times.
“Most of the time I’m living in that vibrating and shifting center point between all that was and all that’s to come. I’m trying to pay attention, to drink in what is so right and good and true in this moment in time. Peace of heart and mind, peace on earth, peace within and between us, comes in small moments of beauty, waves of goodness in the here and now that wash in and out like the tides.”
With a poet’s voice (as opposed to a social scientist’s), she writes that the key to navigating foggy or dark places may be to find what is still visible and beautiful close in. A willingness to light one candle and then another and another and another—to take one tentative step in the right direction, watch for things that clarify or point the way, grateful for the goodness seen and unseen, while we walk forward using all available light.
Looking for the goodness and love knowing that the path forward will not always be clear. That strikes me as a more realistic way to live our lives as we move through the liminality that is life.
A new edition of an award-winning history, published for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, illuminates the overlooked dimensions of American history and the stories that shape nations.
So much of how we understand and interpret the American Revolution comes from the point of view of the victors. But as the recent Ken Burns documentary made clear, there were at least two sides to the conflict. It is important in understanding overlooked dimensions of American history that we hear these perspectives. Thankfully a sympathetic yet balanced portrayal of one of the Revolution’s defeated voices is being re-released on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974; new 250th anniversary edition published in 2026) by Bernard Bailyn is the history of the native-born royal governor of Massachusetts Bay from 1771–1774 and his fellow American loyalists who found themselves on the losing side of the Revolutionary War. In the preface, Bailyn writes that he was taking on this subject at the end of a long period of partisanship. His work was to help us see the “tragedy” of the Revolution. Not the sadness, or the error or wrongness of it. But to better understand “the limits within which men struggled.” All men, Bailyn wrote, “the famous and the obscure, the best and the worst, the winners and the losers.” We have to understand those stories—especially of those “who suffered violence and vilification, who were driven out of the land and forced to resettle elsewhere in middle life, and died grieving for the homes they had lost”—if we are to make sense of the Revolution. Thomas Hutchinson was the best-known embodiment of those Americans who still clung to England and who died in exile longing for their native home, a home that was transformed and unrecognizable to them as a result of revolution.
Bailyn paints a portrait of Hutchinson as rational, circumspect, and cool. Restraint and calculation had been a part of his way of life since childhood.
“Virtuous but not stylish, intelligent but didactic, heavy-spirited and self-absorbed, he judged people, and often found them wanting. He had no great admiration for mankind in general.”
As such, Hutchinson was prone to suspend determination upon the “real state of mind” of others until he knew them a long time and could personally weigh the evidence of their conduct. “Deeply bred—locked tight—in the culture of an intensely Protestant, mercantile province of the British world and heir to its establishment,” Hutchinson “sought no conquests in a larger world but steady gains in the one he knew.”
Through some 400 pages of well-documented and sometimes antiquated but generally compelling prose, Bailyn shows us how Hutchinson’s reputation in Boston and New England grew from that of an “unimpeachable if conservative leader of the Anglo-American establishment to that of a sinister manipulator of secret forces.” Two of his greatest foes throughout this transformation were John Adams and James Otis, Jr., who would ultimately shape public opinion about Hutchinson most powerfully. Adams especially was outraged when this “layman” was elevated to the position of chief judgeship, and for years he saw dangerous and secret forces at work.
As the publisher’s note to the new edition makes clear, Bailyn not only makes the loyalist position comprehensible but he also “rehabilitates a deft statesman who was far from the demagogue imagined in Patriot propaganda.” Hutchinson, as Bailyn documents throughout, shared many Patriot grievances and as royal governor he faithfully represented colonial public opinion to both Crown and Parliament.
In my book group discussion of this work, the question was immediately raised of “which side we would have been on” in the Revolution. We also asked “who plays the roles of John and Samuel Adams in today’s world.” The fact that these questions came to our mind shows the power of Bailyn’s work to broaden our perspective and push the reader to think in new—and perhaps uncomfortable—ways.
Histories written fifty years ago rarely survive current scrutiny. This remarkable portrait of one of the Revolution’s defeated voices is a welcome exception. In part, that success comes because Bailyn—who remains influential to this day—wanted us to respect the “pastness” of history. As his obituary in the New York Times described his focus:
“Within the profession, Professor Bailyn was a frequent critic of overspecialization, abstraction and politicized ‘presentism’—that is, interpreting past events in terms of modern thinking and values. For him, it was essential to respect the strangeness and pastness of the past, and to see it, as much as possible, on its own terms.
‘The establishment, in some significant degree, of a realistic understanding of the past, free of myths, wish fulfillments and partisan delusions, is essential for social sanity,’ he said in a 1995 lecture.”
I love that term “the strangeness and pastness of the past.” This National Book Award–winning masterpiece succeeds in being largely free “of myths, wish fulfillments, and partisan delusion” and also marked “a turning point in historiography, illuminating the overlooked dimensions of American history and the stories that shape nations.”
More to come . . .
DJB
Image of the Battle of Long Island from Wikimedia.
In a year of turmoil and challenge, it is important to remember that no one has it all figured out. As we continue to look to the promise of what America is about and work to make it a land for everyone, here—in a Saturday grab bag—are thoughts from writers and songs from musicians to help us move forward.
GUIDING US THROUGH A WORLD WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND
My friend and mentor Frank Wade likes to remind us that the job of God is already taken. That’s always important to remember, but especially in times like these. Frank, an Episcopal priest, sent around a sermon for Palm Sunday to his many friends and he added this coda:
“With the tragic events of Holy Week and the similarly tragic events in the news, it is important to remember that our faith does not explain the world. It guides us through a world we cannot understand.”
Anne Lamott, writing in her Hallelujah Anyway! Substack, notes that a friend told her once “that when he thinks he is in charge of all of life, he remembers little kids sitting in car seats with steering wheels, thinking they are making the car turn left, or right.” She also is fond of reminding people who are working to keep the faith in democracy and love in these times, to remember Wendell Berry’s line about being joyful although you have considered all the evidence.
Good advice.
CURIOSITY AND A BEGINNER’S MIND
Our daughter, in her wonderfully named Substack The Clairevoyant Report, posted a terrific April Fools Day post on The Wisdom of Naïveté. Claire begins by noting that in our culture, we tend to look down upon naïveté, considering this quality the sign of someone immature, unintelligent, unrealistic, or simply less “evolved.”
“But what do we miss out on when we insist that we must have everything figured out before we even embark? Curiosity and a beginner’s mind allow us to explore new possibilities, consider divergent paths, and perceive what lies ahead with fresh eyes. Embracing the ‘not knowing’ can lead us in directions beyond our prior imagination.”
Claire is using naïveté as a positive force, and I agree with her perspective. Later in the post, she asks her readers to consider “where in my life am I getting in my own way by believing I already know how things will go?”
The writer Rebecca Solnit has one example that responds to Claire’s question.
“Naïve cynics shoot down possibilities, including the possibility of exploring the full complexity of any situation. They take aim at the less cynical, so that cynicism becomes a defensive posture and an avoidance of dissent. They recruit through brutality. If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. . . . Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised.”
Claire is a thoughtful writer. I encourage you to read her post . . . and to subscribe!
ACTIVISM AS THE ANTIDOTE TO FEAR
On “No Kings” Saturday, A. D. Blair reminded us in Why We Fight that “politics doesn’t stop in an authoritarian system and we cannot give up the struggle.” The most direct and reliable consequence of cynicism isn’t wisdom, it’s passivity.
As my Congressman, Jamie Raskin, reminds us, “Activism is the antidote to fear.”
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
This is as good a day as any to return to celebrate the Woody Guthrie 1940 classic This Land is Your Land. Many of us believe, for a variety of reasons, that it should be the national anthem. No less an authority than Bruce Springsteen has said, it is “one of the most beautiful songs ever written about America.”
Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land during the Great Depression in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. There’s a wonderful book by John Shaw entitled This Land That I Love: Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and the Story of Two American Anthems. As Shaw describes it, Guthrie was hitchhiking his way to New York City when he became upset over hearing the Kate Smith version of Berlin’s song over and over again during the trip. Guthrie sat down and wrote a song in anger, but his revisions over time turned it into one of the most shared and beloved songs in our nation’s history. I’ll begin with the unvarnished recording from Woody, with the bonus of a picture of him playing his famous “This machine kills fascists” guitar. (Note: The song ends about the 2:40 mark in the video)
I also have a couple of other great takes on the song. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings play a wonderfully up-tempo soul version that goes all the way with the inclusion of the verses usually left out. Jones commands the stage and I could listen to this celebration of America over and over again.
As I’ve written before, one of the most moving versions—with an emotion that cuts to the heart of what Woody was saying—is the one by Bruce Springsteen, which he began adding to his live shows in 1980. In this deeply felt and chilling version from a 1985 concert at LA’s Memorial Coliseum, Springsteen notes in his intro that, “What’s so great about (the song) is that it gets right to the heart of the promise of what our country was suppose to be about.” He adds that he sings it with the reminder that “with countries, just like with people, it’s easy to let the best of yourself slip away.”
” . . . a broadening and deepening of who matters, with the end of slavery, the beginning of rights for women, movements for racial justice and disability and LGBTQ rights, the very recent public recognition of the profound wrongness of the genocide and dispossession of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.”
Her newest book looks at all that we’ve achieved in these areas. The current administration supported by the Republican Party “is all about trying to run the process backward to make women and BIPOC people less equal again, to erase the ‘certain inalienable rights’ that undocumented immigrants and refugees share with the rest of us, to make gender back into airtight boxes, to reinstate the inequality behind colonialism.”
To see the implications of this attempt to turn back the clock, read Alan Elrod’s Abuser Politics: Christian Male Supremacists Want Women to Shut Up in Liberal Currents. “The desire for quiet women—really for silent women—in every public forum is neither about adherence to Biblical truth nor the revelation of natural law.”
Solnit and Elrod’s perspectives fit in well with Celeste Davis and her writing in the Substack newsletter Matriarchal Blessing about the one word that is seldom used to explain why so many men are in the Epstein files. We talk endlessly about the factors that make rape easier, but never about the factors that cause rape in the first place. It isn’t wealth, elite networks, institutional failure, or blackmail.
It is patriarchy.
And yes, I know that as a straight, white, male in America today, I have received privileges that gave me a certain confidence as I navigated life. A confidence that was often undeserved and unearned. But beginning with the guidance of two broad-minded and inclusive parents, I have been working hard to ensure that my world view includes, as Davis puts it, an unshakable understanding of women as living human beings who have just as much to contribute to the world as men. I work to ensure that my sense of worth has absolutely nothing to do with domination.
To return to Davis and her post on the Epstein files:
“. . . if we keep only talking about all the things that make rape easier (money, power, elite networks, anonymity) and never talk about the things that actually cause the desire to rape in the first place (entitlement, domination, patriarchy), then we will continue on our insane, unending weed whacking quest without ever pulling up the root.”
WE CAN DO HARD THINGS
The posts about the attempted silencing of women reminded me of an amazing occurrence I witnessed in Madagascar on March 8th during International Women’s Day. As I wrote a few weeks ago, we arrived in the city of Hellville (Andoany) amidst a huge celebration of International Women’s Day, referred to as “Valo Mars” in Madagascar.
Women’s groups came to Hellville from throughout the region to march in the local parade. Focused on honoring women’s strength, heritage, and contribution to society, it is a significant day for recognizing local women’s roles in development, culture, and craftsmanship. The parade of women dressed to represent their local communities or organizations was an amazing sight that stretched for more than a mile throughout the main section of the city.
In 2022, poet and songwriter Carrie Newcomer sang the song You Can Do This Hard Thing live at an annual International Women’s Day Performance, and it includes a wonderful introduction. It seems an appropriate coda to what all these writers and musicians are telling us in these times.
More to come . . .
DJB
Rainbow by Cindy Lever from Pixabay. Photo of lightening strikes by Marc Renken on Unsplash. Monarch butterfly (the only monarch we want) and images across America by DJB. Grand Canyon by Claire Brown. Madagascar parade by DJB.
Travel that changed my perspective, expanded my horizons, and . . . in the process . . . shaped my life.
Journeys are literal and figurative, temporal and spiritual. Interior journeys can take place without leaving home. Obviously not all life-changing travel has to be to distant lands. Recently, however, I have been thinking of past journeys in my life where I have moved physically as well as emotionally and intellectually. I’ve wanted to reflect on what I gained from seeing more of the world and what we have to lose as travel becomes more difficult in this time of self-inflicted geopolitical suicide.
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.”
Martin Buber
I was in college before I took my first airplane ride. It was another fifteen years after that before I traveled outside the U.S. Growing up in a large, middle-class family in the 1950s and 1960s, we didn’t just jump on an airplane when we felt the urge. Nonetheless, I caught the travel bug early.
Pico Iyer has touched on the subject of why we travel in a way that reflects my experience.
“We don’t travel,” Iyer wrote, “in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life . . . there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps.”
As Sarah Wilkie has noted, those of us with the means and inclination to travel are rewarded with amazing opportunities to learn about different cultures, different landscapes, different environments. We also learn about how similar we are to others around the world. Travel—which is truly a privilege—helps us learn to celebrate our diversity and rejoice in our similarities.
What follows are short takes on fifteen journeys that changed my life.
Springfield and Chicago 1963
The first family vacation I remember was a trip to Illinois in 1963. Two places shaped me forever: Wrigley Field, where I saw my first major league baseball game and became a fan for life; and Abraham Lincoln’s Home in Springfield, a place of autobiography. It was something from this place that gave Lincoln the strength and character to lead a nation.
Out of the ordinary can come extraordinary people.
Philadelphia 1976
Photo of Jimmy Carter campaigning in Philadelphia. I’m captured in this photograph, just to the left of the hat being waved in the front of the crowd.
A few weeks before the first national post-Watergate election I traveled to Philadelphia on my first airplane flight to attend my first National Trust Annual Preservation Conference—beginning a string of 41 over my career. Being in the rooms where the founders debated concepts such as the self-evident truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness made history come alive. The relevance of past, place, and present also exploded in my face when I wedged my way into the tens of thousands who filled four streets that came together at an intersection where Jimmy Carter was scheduled for a massive downtown rally. Here I was, participating in the political process in the city where the concept of a government, deriving powers from the consent of the governed, had its most powerful realization.
In casting my first vote for president, I would soon be a part of what Abraham Lincoln famously said was the ongoing fight to see if a nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” can long endure. That fight continues.
Charlottesville 1982
Honeymoon at Prospect Hill
As a graduate student in Atlanta in 1982, I found time during spring break to marry Candice and take a honeymoon trip to Prospect Hill—a 1732 farmhouse bed & breakfast outside Charlottesville that has since gone upscale. A year later we moved to Staunton, just over the mountain, where we grew together as a couple, welcomed our children, and gathered lifetime friends and memories from our 15 years there.
Journeys are often about finding either something we’ve lost or discovery of something we’ve never seen before. And when we’re lucky, a journey with a lifetime partner is one of extraordinary discovery. I’ve been very, very lucky.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Richmond 1993
My favorite baby picture
On a bright, clear, and wintery Sunday morning—December 20, 1992—two infants, each barely over 5 pounds in size, entered and forever changed our world. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, because we wouldn’t learn of Andrew and Claire’s birth from the adoption agency until the next morning.
The journey I’m focused on here took place on January 14, 1993. We drove to Richmond in the morning, met them and their foster mom at the adoption agency, and then put them in their car seats and into our hearts forever. When we returned to Staunton they received a royal welcome from friends and family who decorated the house with balloons, left strollers and diapers on the front porch, and brought food over by the boat load. It was a good thing, because we were outnumbered. Twin infants and two adults . . . thank God the reinforcements arrived soon!
Through the years the milestones have been chronicled on More to Come. To watch them grow into the wonderful adults they’ve become has been the joy of our lives. We remember each phase of that growth, knowing that it wasn’t always easy (for them or for us), but secure in the knowledge that they were surrounded by love.
Whenever the passage of time comes up, I usually relay this story from 2014 of a mom with a set of boy-girl twins in front of me in the drug store line, with the children in their two-seater stroller. The kids were beautiful, and they were having the most wonderful conversation about shoes. The mom was so patient and kind. It was a joy to simply stand there and watch the love.
After passing along their prescription, the mom gathered her things to leave. I asked about the twins’ age. She replied that they were two-and-a-half. I smiled, and said I had 21-year-old boy-girl twins, and this brought back lots of memories. The mom asked if I had any advice. I replied simply, “Savor every moment.”
Northern Ireland 1998
One of my first real overseas trips was to Northern Ireland in December of 1998, just eight months after the Good Friday Peace Accords were signed. Belfast was just stepping away from The Troubles. Boarder crossings were no longer gated and controlled by armed soldiers. The constantly changing coastal landscapes of County Antrim and the Giants Causeway captivated and moved the soul.
In the cold of the coming winter I also discovered that Irish whiskey is great for warming chilled bones.
The Nobel Peace Prizes were awarded for the Good Friday Accords on our last day in the country. When I returned last fall I found a small remembrance at City Hall in Belfast of the transformative and life-changing work of President Bill Clinton and Senator George Mitchell in helping bring about those agreements. U.S. involvement meant something positive in the world. Today, more than ever, we need to hear and reflect upon these stories of American courage and leadership in difficult times.
Cuba 2001
I was on a small private plane with five other National Trust and ICOMOS representatives traveling to Cuba just two months after 9/11. We were meeting with the mayor of Havana and other representatives to discuss heritage conservation efforts. I’ll never forget the wealth—and the deterioration—of the historic architecture, the “time stands still” look from the 1950s, the eagerness of the government officials to show us small pockets of extraordinary preservation efforts, and the friendliness of the Cuban people.
History is always layered, much more complicated than the stories we often hear, and always under construction. Self-serving political slogans from all sides do little to make life better for a country’s citizens.
Ukraine 2006
Virtually every week since Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in 2022 I have thought back to my visit in 2006. In the words of Chris Hedges, Putin’s war in Ukraine is a “mythic” war, where those involved seek to imbue events with meanings they do not have. Of all the wonders of Ukraine I saw on that trip—Odessa, Yalta, and more—it was when we left the coastal resort cities and visited a small, rural village that the people of the country became much more than just workers in the hospitality and tourism industry.
One memory—that of a villager gathering reeds in the waterways near his home to use on his thatched roof—is what remains most vivid in my mind as I think of how the courageous Ukrainian people continue to defend democracy, even as our support ebbs and flows.
India 2007
This is the first view one has when visiting the Taj Mahal
In December of 2007, I traveled to India to participate in the establishment of the International National Trusts Organisation (INTO). It was an extraordinary trip which included an opportunity to see heritage conservation work in practice in South Asia; share the stage with the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh; visit Gandhi’s grave; and spend days touring world renowned sites such as the Taj Mahal.
I was reminded again and again of the longevity of history in India, where cultural worldviews have evolved over thousands of years, and how their perspective differs from the often truncated story we tell of our country.
Both Candice and I had taken fondly remembered western trips with our families when we were young. We were reminded that you can use your own memories in positive ways to build new, unique ones for your children.
Normandy 2013
If you don’t cry at Normandy, you may not have a soul.
Utah Beach. Omaha Beach. Row after row of headstones—crosses and the Star of David—most with the names of men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Others honoring those whose names are known only to God. Our 90-year-old next-door neighbor at the time told us he’d never been to Normandy but he had flown “over it on D-Day, trying to take out a German gun placement.” We were able to show August the photos of the beaches and, yes, the craters that remain from the bombs that fell on that day.
Ordinary men and women doing extraordinary things. Heroes all. And some live next door.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost Tour 2014
In the summer before Claire’s senior year in college, the two of us drove 4,590 miles and passed through 13 states to get from Washington, DC, to Claremont, CA. We called it our Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour. Yes, we took the northern route to go to Southern California. Over the course of the 19 days I wrote about the plains, mountains, valleys, coast lines, Great Lakes . . . you name it. To look at our country’s landscape day after day, as it changes going east to west and then north to south, is a life-enriching experience. Every mountain range we crossed was unique and breathtaking in its own way. Our rivers and lakes can be both powerful and peaceful. Unfortunately we have destroyed much of what is wonderful and beautiful about our country through greed and horrible development decisions.
I’m thankful I had a chance to see both the good and the bad with my extraordinary daughter. Let’s hope her generation and those that follow have enough time and political will to reset our destructive environmental policies, especially after this current period of backlash and rule by oligarchs.
“We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
Anand Giridharadas
Rome 2016
The Pantheon ceiling and light
I was so very fortunate to have six weeks at the American Academy in Rome as part of a sabbatical. It provided the opportunity to immerse myself in the life, architecture, food, people, and culture of an international city for weeks at a time. My former colleague Tom Mayes, a fellow of the Academy, has written that, “Old places are beautiful,” fully recognizing that beauty is not a simple topic. Nonetheless this one sentence captures key elements for me, while also describing my time in Rome:
As I read and talk to people about beauty, a few words and phrases capture the experiences I’ve had—and that I believe other people also have—at beautiful old places: delight, exhilarating surprise, speechlessness, the language of timeless reality, echo of an ideal, sudden unexpected harmony of the body, mind and world.
Japan 2019
Todai-ji Temple in Nara, Japan, a World Heritage Site
Six weeks after my retirement I joined a two-week exploration of Japan. The World Heritage sites were powerful and moving, especially as one found places away from the crowds to privately indulge in the architecture, gardens, and spiritual meaning of the spaces. More modern sites, such as Hiroshima and I.M. Pei’s Miho Museum, were also important touchstones for understanding parts of history and life in today’s Japan.
Once again it was at the more out-of-the-way places where I found the time and space to connect more deeply with the culture of our host nation. The small traditional village of Uchiko on Shikoku Island featured an exquisite, full-scale kabuki theatre, one of my favorite buildings from the entire tour. Similarly, Toko-ji in Hagi, a medieval center of Japan, was a large site where you could lose yourself among the hundreds of moss-covered stone lanterns guarding the graves of five Mori lords.
As was true often throughout this trip, the effect at Toko-ji was sublime.
Mekong River Cruise 2022
It was a thing of beauty.
Standing on the bank of the Siem Reap River near the Terrace of the Leper King in Angkor Thom, Cambodia, the young man cast his fishing net much as his ancestors had done over the centuries. My camera froze that moment from our two week visit to Vietnam and Cambodia in October of 2022, but it was the timelessness I wanted to capture.
The practice of heritage conservation works within a world touched by the passage of hours, days, years, decades, and centuries. Landmarks, you see, are not created by architects and builders alone. What really makes a site a landmark is the place it holds in a community’s memory. Memories are created over time. Memories are poets, not historians. Memories can be deeply spiritual.
My memories from one of the most extraordinary journeys I’ve been privileged to make will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Next year Candice and I are revisiting this land to once again explore the rich history and vibrant culture of tropical Indochina as National Trust Tours takes us to Vietnam & Cambodia—Cruising the Mekong River. If you care to join us, I promise it will touch you in deep and meaningful ways.
Paris 2022/2025
Finally, our family first visited Paris in 2022 as a celebration of our 40th wedding anniversary, and we returned in 2025 for an even longer stay in France to celebrate my 70th birthday. Maybe the best way to express why we return and return (and plan to return again) is simply to call upon the incomparable Tatiana Eva-Marie for one explanation.
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
Carl Jung
Travel, by placing us in an environment that is different from what we experience in our daily lives, puts us in the frame of mind to live in ways that bring wonder, joy, and empathy. Our journeys are more meaningful when we keep some room in our hearts for the unimaginable. Travel allows us time to dawdle and dream, and perhaps even to be bewildered!
I have found that when you travel it pays to leave enough empty space to feel and experience life. Those gaps are where the magic begins. And when you think of the places you’ve been, as I do here, don’t be too hard on yourself if a few of the facts slip. Just get the poetry right.
More to come . . .
DJB
Lincoln homeplace photo by Yinan Chen from Pixabay. Photo of Northern Ireland’s Dunluce castle by Claire Brown from a 2009 youth group pilgrimage. Havana photo from Unsplash. Goulding’s View at Monument Valley by Claire Brown. DJB at the World’s Largest Ball of Twine by Claire Brown. Bridge in Paris by Leonard Cotte on Unsplash. Sunrise over Angkor Wat photo at the top of the post and all other pictures not credited are by DJB
A summary of the March posts from the MORE TO COME newsletter.
(NOTE: If you are reading this post via email, click on the title to see the online version, so you can read the entire poem included here.)
March is my favorite month.
This is the time of year that begins my annual trip around the sun. Birthday celebrations and best wishes from family and friends spark many happy memories. But they also bring to mind special remembrances of Mom and Dad. That’s where all the love began.
Then I’ve always appreciated the fact that our anniversary arrives on or around the spring equinox. Light overtakes darkness, new possibilities abound, the cherry blossoms explode, and after a period of wintering all seems bright and exuberant. That seems appropriate for the celebration of a marriage, whether in its first year or its 44th.
Finally, baseball season begins in March. Bart Giamatti—PhD professor in comparative literature, president of Yale University, commissioner of baseball, and a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox until his untimely death in 1989—once wrote about how baseball is designed to break your heart . . . but only after two glorious opening acts.
“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
There are those who learn after a few times and leave baseball and sports behind, Giamatti writes. They have the wisdom to know that nothing lasts.
“I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”
In the chaos that is our national political life, what helps us see those things that last forever might as well be love, hope, joy, and living in the moment. That’s the promise of March to me.
Let’s jump in and see what caught my eye this month in MORE TO COME.
READER FAVORITES
The first part of the month was spent on the other side of the world as we traveled with National Trust Tours to the Seychelles and Madagascar. The longer visual travelogue of our journey—Passage from the Seychelles to Madagascar—was the top reader favorite this month. There you will discover lemurs, giant tortoises, chameleons, waterfalls, an amazing International Women’s Day parade in Hellville, Madagascar, and much more.
Those of us with the means and inclination to travel are rewarded with amazing opportunities to learn about different cultures, different landscapes, different environments. We also learn about how similar we are to others around the world. Travel—which is truly a privilege—helps us learn to celebrate our diversity and rejoice in our similarities.
Next year Candice and I are revisiting a land that will be included in any list of the most memorable journeys of my life. We’ll explore the rich history and vibrant culture of tropical Indochina as National Trust Tours takes us to Vietnam & Cambodia—Cruising the Mekong River. I promise it will touch you in deep and meaningful ways. Come travel with us!
A FINE WAY TO CELEBRATE
A giant tortoise can live to be 200, so this one that we saw in the Seychelles probably has a few years on me. Nonetheless, I began another trip around the sun myself this month. A fine way to celebrate a special day has a bit of an animal theme to it, as I quote the Billy Collins poem Once in a Dog’s Age.
Every creature moves along
the treadmill of time at its own pace,
most insects hurrying along,
while the tortoise lumbers under its armor.
WE’RE TALKING BASEBALL
Did I mention that baseball season has begun?
My exuberance bubbled over in March as I posted three columns focused on this timeless game.
Playing for joy came at the end of a thrilling World Baseball Classic. Most of the teams involved, but not all, reminded us of what it means to play for joy.
Take me out to the ballgame looks at some of the best of the songs about baseball. Who knew that Bob Dylan wrote a song about Catfish Hunter?!
The dandelion principle is my take on the fascinating Why Fish Don’t Exist, which is part biography, part memoir, and part scientific thriller. I paired it with a few photos from our trip as a visual teaser.
Celebration of interdependence is my review of the wonderful Clint Smith book of poems Above Ground. It is also my fourth installment in the series on independent bookshops in the DC region.
There is a war on history that has about as much to do with history as the “occupation” of Washington or Minneapolis has to do with crime. A new book of essays written by one of our country’s most distinguished historians arrives into this moment like a bracing breath of fresh air. I review Eric Foner’s newest work in Illuminating the past in light of the present.
The narrative of America considers Walter Isaacson’s short book on the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths . . .”).
Nothing says hope and joy better than a rainbow at a baseball stadium
In response to my baseball-themed post Playing for joy, Brilliant Reader and baseball fan Robyn Ryle commented on Joe Posnanski’s column about the soullessness of the American men’s baseball team during the World Baseball Classic.
“This was amazing! Thanks for calling it to my attention. He summarized everything I felt watching Team U.S.A. but had not yet wrapped words around. They were joyless! Which is exactly one of the things that happens in the slide into authoritarianism, because joy is subversive. And, yes, when Harper hit that home run and saluted for the camera, I was grossed out, not impressed. It was all just very yuck.”
Oh, and Robyn is the author of the novel Sex of the Midwest, which you should absolutely read.
DON’T POSTPONE JOY
Thanks, as always, for reading. Your friendship, support and feedback mean more than I can ever express.
As you travel life’s highways be open to love; thirst for wonder; undertake some mindful, transformative walking every day. Recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, public servants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.
But also keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. Take time to dawdle and dream. Let yourself be bewildered!
Leave enough empty space to feel and experience life. Those gaps are where the magic begins. When times get rough, let your memories wander back to some wonderful place with remembrances of family and friends. But don’t be too hard on yourself if a few of the facts slip. Just get the poetry right.
Be comfortable in the mystery. Seek the uplifting spirit that leads to a life of grace and wonder.
Grace to help us remember that we can do hard things. “Grace to never sell yourself short; Grace to risk something big for something good; and Grace to remember the world is now too dangerous for anything but the truth and too small for anything but love . . .”
Wonder to help us remember that “we are here to keep watch, not to keep.” Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. And bash into some joy along the way.
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Five books. Every month. A variety of topics from different genres. Here is the list from March 2026.
Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays (2025) by Eric Foner makes it clear in a little under 60 essays that while there is no single “correct” way to study history, we must engage seriously with the past if we are to unlock and confront some of the most difficult challenges we face today. Foner looks at history through the lens of his own groundbreaking work around the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as from the perspective of a wide range of professional historians working in the field. The latter comes primarily from book reviews that provide the reader with context and new insights. Foner views the horrors of slavery and the violent return to white rule that came at the end of Reconstruction with his eyes wide open. Many of the essays and reviews seek to move us past the “consensus” of the Jim Crow era that the “Negro Rule” of Reconstruction was corrupt and ineffective while praising the white “redeemers” who used violence to stop Blacks from voting, holding office and owning property. It is a consensus that has been repudiated by professional historians but that is still a widely-held belief by large portions of the American public. In clear and cogent writing easily accessible to a wider mass audience, Foner works to help us address the question of whether America can ever escape the legacy of slavery without a more honest examination of the past.
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (2025) by Walter Isaacson examines the narrative of America through the lens of the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence. In 67 short pages Isaacson makes it clear that while we think of Thomas Jefferson as the author of one of the world’s most famous documents, he really just wrote the first draft which was then edited and changed multiple times. The drafting committee, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, made substantial alterations, including to the first phrase, which Jefferson penned as “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . .” It was Franklin who crossed out “sacred” and inserted “self-evident.” From there Isaacson takes us through what the men (and they were all men) were thinking and the cultural and intellectual influences that swirled around them. These truths became the “creed that bound a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation.” The Declaration of Independence, as written in 1776 and then reinforced “four score and seven years” later at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln, defined both our common ground and our aspirations. It is in the exploration of what constitutes that common ground and how we continue to hold on to it in perilous times where Isaacson makes his case: We must seek those truths once again if we are to survive as a democracy.
Why Baseball Matters (2018) by Susan Jacoby is the author’s personal story about how she came to love the game while watching it on television in her grandfather’s bar, a no-holds-barred defense against changes to the integrity of the game, and a worried meditation on how the game can survive in our age of short attention spans. Reading this work some eight years after it was published—a time when the sport made significant changes (largely positive) to move the speed of the games back to their historic and natural pace while also succumbing to big-time gambling that threatens to wreck all professional sports—provides us with a perspective against which to evaluate Jacoby’s work. She only answers the key question in the title at the end. Baseball matters, she decides, because it provides genuine nourishment rather than junk food. It demands attention in an attention-free era. It matters because the same game can essentially be played on a small town sandlot by young fans learning about loss (the best fail two out of three times), teamwork, and love . . . just as you can in a big league park. It matters because it “has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.” Baseball matters because it still lends itself, Jacoby asserts, to a unique conflation of the game itself with American virtue.
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (2020) by Lulu Miller is part biography, part memoir, and part scientific thriller. Miller began this work studying David Starr Jordan—a taxonomist, a man who would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day, and the president first of Indiana University and then Stanford. Even though the universe seemed to conspire against his work—his specimen collections were demolished three times by natural disasters—Miller was initially taken with how he fought back against the chaos. Her life was falling apart at the time, it wasn’t clear why any one person mattered in the greater scheme of things, and she thought Jordan may have found a way to carry on in the face of multiple disasters which would have destroyed lesser individuals. But as she dug deeper she discovered a darker, more troubling story. As president Jordan worked to cover up the poisoning of university founder Jane Stanford at the time she was preparing to have him removed. After he was forced out at Stanford Jordan remained active in the scientific community of the day, enthusiastically embracing eugenics, the discredited movement of the late 19th and early 20th century broadly defined as the use of selective breeding to improve the human race. Miller comes to the realization in this sometimes dark but ultimately uplifting book that from “the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenics dream of perfection” one life doesn’t seem to matter. But this is just one of infinite perspectives. Although Charles Darwin was often misunderstood, it is his creed that human beings . . . and all living creatures . . . in tangible, concrete ways matter to this planet.
Above Ground: Poems (2023) by Clint Smith explores the emotional terrain of fatherhood in works that are touching, light-hearted, gripping, loving, insightful, disturbing, and delightful. In other words, they are just like being a parent. Smith is a gifted writer who looks deeply at lineage and the history surrounding being black in America. He is also discovering the world anew through the eyes of a child, with the curiosity and joy that often comes when one encounters life for the first time. As the publisher notes, Above Ground “wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body.” I had a range of emotions reading the collection: delight, laughter, and recognition of life with children, certainly. But also sadness at the world our children—and especially children of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and children of immigrants—inhabit today. Smith has captured the joys and sorrows of life through vibrant poems that look at the everyday occurrences of parenting.
WHAT’S ON THE NIGHTSTAND FOR APRIL (Subject to change at the whims of the reader)
At the conclusion of a fantastic World Baseball Classic (congratulations Venezuela) and the beginning of what promises to be another lost regular season wandering in the wilderness for my Washington Nationals, I go through my regular spring training routine of reading about the game.
Bill “Spaceman” Lee—the effective 1970s reliever for the Boston Red Sox and the Montreal Expos whose “natural sinkerball is dwarfed in baseball memory by his natural inability to utter a dull sentence”—once told the Los Angeles Times that “Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, you’ll straighten out the rest of the world.”
That quote is the epigraph of the conclusion to a work that I found largely frustrating in part because of the writer’s insistence on continually re-plowing soil she had already tilled and in part because I simply disagree—based on first-hand experience—with her take on changes to speed up the game. It isn’t the fault of the author, but I was also reminded of what the scourge of gambling has done to the game since the book was written in 2018.
This slim volume illustrates the challenges of the Yale University Press series “Why X Matters.” This is the fifth I’ve read from this series. In the hands of the right author these short works illuminate and expand our horizons. When the author’s point-of-view gets in the way of the subject, however, they can become personal polemics that frustrate all but the true believers.
Why Baseball Matters (2018) by Susan Jacoby is the author’s personal story about how she came to love the game while watching it on television in her grandfather’s bar, a no-holds-barred defense against changes to the integrity of the game, and a worried meditation on how the game can survive in our age of short attention spans and social media takes that do not support baseball’s natural rhythms. Reading this work some eight years after it was published—a time when the sport made significant changes (largely positive) to move the speed of the games back to their historic and natural pace while also succumbing to big-time gambling that threatens to wreck all professional sports—provides us with a perspective against which to evaluate Jacoby’s work.
It isn’t until the conclusion, when she moves beyond baseball’s vulnerabilities (some repeated again and again) that she answers the key question in the title. Baseball matters, she decides, because it provides genuine nourishment rather than junk food. It demands attention in an attention-free era. It matters because the same game can essentially be played on a small town sandlot by young fans learning about loss (the best fail two out of three times), teamwork, and love . . . just as you can in a big league park. It matters because it “has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.” Baseball matters because it still lends itself, Jacoby asserts, to a unique conflation of the game itself with American virtue.
“The emotions baseball is capable of evoking are part of its special currency, but it is a currency that can easily be devalued if used in an exclusionary, aggressive fashion.”
Jacoby spends a great deal of time worried about the proposed rules (at the time) to speed up the game. What she never really addresses, however, is how much the modern game has dramatically slowed down, adding almost an hour on average to the historic pace, as we waited for batters to play with their batting gloves (I’m looking at you Bryce Harper), pitchers to throw over to first countless times, and everyone to take “lollygagging” to new extremes. I saw my first major league game in 1963 in Wrigley Field. Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Chicago Cubs 4-1 in a brisk two hours and four minutes. The game needed to be reset, and the pitch clock, the rules on throwing over to first, and other changes have been—to my mind—very successful.
Jacoby also addresses the problem of gambling and baseball, and it is here that she’s spot on. She notes, as I have as well, that any time baseball has become involved with gambling, however indirect, it doesn’t turn out well. My first inclination is to say that I’m not a fan of the automated balls-and-strikes change because we’re doing it to provide precision to gamblers when they bet big sums. But . . . then I watch a game like the World Baseball Classic between the US and the Dominican Republic and see an umpire make two terrible third strike calls late in the game—one to Juan Soto who has the best eye for the strike zone I’ve ever seen—and I think perhaps its time. Here’s how Joe Posnanski described the umpire’s performance.
“Yes, home plate umpire Corey Blaser rang up Soto on a pitch that wasn’t even close to a strike, and while this wasn’t what made the game unsatisfying—as most of you know, a worse call was yet to come—it really struck me wrong. I couldn’t even believe how much that call ticked me off. . . .
. . . the humanity of umpiring has already been taken out of the game . . . except for ball-strike calls. And with the Automated Ball Strike challenge system coming in 2026, that last bit of humanity will begin to disappear.
Is that something worth mourning?
Well, it’s not if, in the eighth inning of a tight and exciting one-run game between the United States and the Dominican Republic, Corey Blaser thinks he knows the strike zone better than Juan Freaking Soto.”
The thing is, the most egregious call came in the next inning and it ended the game when Blaser rang up Geraldo Perdomo after a breathtaking eight-pitch at-bat on a pitch that was so far below the strike zone even a blind man could see it.
Joe said that a few people wrote that “Sunday’s game was basically one long advertisement for the ABS Challenge System.” I have to agree.
Each year during spring training I pick a baseball book to read. Over the years I’ve amassed quite a collection.
My rather unruly collection of books about the game I love.
As you can tell, as I was finishing this book I took in the closing games of the 2026 WBC. And that wonderful experience—from the raucous fans of the Latin American teams to the tight drama on the faces of the Japanese and American players to the unexpected delight of Italy’s rise through the ranks—suggested that Jacoby’s worry about baseball’s communicability in international settings was misplaced. I’ll enter the regular season with hope, but knowing that my Nationals still don’t seem to have a plan, or an ownership group, to lead them beyond a basic AAA-level team. Oh well.
The bottom line is that Why Baseball Matters is a mixed bag. But to return to the Spaceman, I’ll let Jacoby explain why he’s so right to bring the belly-button into baseball.
“Calling baseball America’s belly-button—that primal remnant of everyone’s first medium of nourishment and entry into the world—is exactly right, just as reverential descriptions of the game as a metaphor for and evidence of American exceptionalism and goodness are exactly wrong . . . Baseball matters because it provides genuine nourishment rather than junk food . . . [and] we cannot afford to lose a game that demands our attention to provide its nourishment.”
Play ball!
More to come . . .
DJB
NOTE: For other MTC reviews of books in this Yale University Press series “Why X Matters” see my takes on:
MORE TO COME... 