In 1958 or ’59 when I was sixteen

I came up with the idea

of replacing my parents’ backyard

with a Japanese garden—

this in a middle-class neighborhood

of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I even showed a design to my mother,

who tried to imagine her smooth green lawn

replaced by rocks, gravel,

and, somehow, a stream.

Even before she said diplomatically

I’ll show this to your daddy

I saw that the whole idea was unrealistic,

and I put out my hand for the drawing,

relieved to be denied. But what if my parents had gone on

not only to put in the garden

but also to demolish our house

and replace it with a Japanese one,

donned kimonos and learned Japanese,

my dad strutting among the pines like a samurai,

mother on bended knees, head bowed? The house stayed the same, the grass grew

and got mowed, I went away to college,

my parents divorced. Now someone else lives there,

happy among the cherry blossoms that never fall. “The Japanese Garden” by Ron Padgett from How Long. © Coffee House Press, 2011. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of poet Louise Bogan (books by this author), born in Livermore Falls, Maine (1897). She said, “I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!”

It’s the birthday of American writer Alex Haley (books by this author), born in Ithaca, New York (1921). He was a journalist and freelance writer and went to work doing interviews for Playboy magazine. He interviewed Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis, Johnny Carson, and Malcolm X. The interview with Malcolm X would turn into Haley’s first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which chronicled Malcolm’s rise from street criminal to national spokesman for The Nation of Islam. It is one of the most-read books in the world. Inspired by the oral histories of his relatives, who traced his lineage back seven generations to the slave era, Haley began researching his genealogy in the late 1960s. It took him more than 10 years of international travel, interviews with tribal members in Gambia, and endless writing on long yellow legal tablets, but in 1976, his book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was published. It was an instant sensation and best-seller and was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize (1977). The book was adapted into a television miniseries, and more than 130 million people tuned in to watch it.

It’s the birthday of playwright Fernando Arrabal (books by this author), born in Melilla, Spanish Morocco (1932). He became known writing plays of “theater of the absurd” style, and also for ones of an abstract style he developed and called “panic art” — the most famous example of which is his play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (1967), in which the characters on stage exchange personalities as the performance progresses.

It’s the birthday of short-story writer Andre Dubus (books by this author), born in Lake Charles, Louisiana (1936). He wrote stories about regular people like bartenders, mechanics, and waitresses in collections such as The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989) and Dancing After Hours (1996). In 1986, after publishing several books of short stories, Dubus stopped to help a woman and a man stranded on the side of the highway, and he was hit by a passing car. He saved the woman’s life by throwing her out of the way, but he lost one of his legs and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He said, “Some of my characters now feel more grateful about simple things — breathing, buying groceries, sunlight — because I do.” He also said, “We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.”

It’s the birthday of playwright David Henry Hwang (books by this author), born in Los Angeles, California (1957). His father was an immigrant to the United States from Shanghai, his mother was an ethnic Chinese who grew up in the Philippines. His best-known play is M. Butterfly (1988), based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a long affair with a Chinese actress who was later revealed to be a man in drag.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®