Wednesday, October 6, 2010

So, I know it doesn't mean all that much right now, today, here in the scramble, the tangle of the multi-faceted present tense, knowing that today's the anniversary of the births of soprano Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum's "Swedish nightingale" (1820) & Geo. Westinghouse, the inventor, in 1846. I'm thinking that I when I cast a backward glance & find out that a pair of long-gone actresses (Carole Lombard & Janet Gaynor) once shared an Oct 6 birthday, back in a vanished world in which audiences would set aside their troubles to sit in the dark together, watching black & silver-white stories gleaming - well, these factoids lend meaning to the day. So here we are, sloshing through the latest in an exceedingly long line of days labeled 6th of October. Souls are stepping through the 6 Oct slot, onto time's conveyor belt, into the bodies of infants, whose dear ones, I hope, will make a cake for them. Some crackpot aunt will note - 'hey, you have the same birthday as Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who built & navigated a seagoing time machine. Isn't that neat? Maybe he was born on a day just like this, except it was in 1914 & everything in Europe had gone to hell, but still...'

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