That's the Chiefs' quarterback, a Super Bowl champ and MVP now, in the picture. Didn't know till about a week ago that his dad is former Twin Pat Mahomes, who pitched for my favorite team in the 90s. Patrick, the quarterback, was born in September of 1995, at the end of his dad's last full season with the Twins. He managed to eke out an 11-year major league career, finishing up with the Pirates in 2003 but then persisting in the minors till 2009.
Today's date, 02/02/2020, is a palindrome—the same forwards and back. Hope you are enjoying it as the next one isn't till December 12, 2121. You are fortunate to be experiencing a palindromic date, however: last one before today was November 11, 1111.
You know those wintry "puddles" that form during thaws, a thin layer of ice on top that is just strong enough so that, stepping on them, your foot doesn't break through but you can see and feel the water squishing below? If I ever tire of walking on them please have an NRA member put me out of my misery with a single shot to the temple.
The pictures below are from the Harvard College yearbook showing some members of the senior class for 1950—Henry Kissinger (bottom) and the poet Robert Bly. Both are well into their 90s now but still alive. I believe Bly resides in rural west central Minnesota, where he grew up, near Madison in Lac qui Parle County. He went to St. Olaf for one year before transferring to Harvard—my alma mater not good enough for him, apparently. I get a kick out of how the yearbook bios name the school where the student "prepared." I suppose in 1950 it hadn't been very long since everyone who went to Harvard had attended a "prep" school. Bly, however, prepared at Madison High School. The US Navy helped, too. But his military experience did not cause him to support all our military adventures, for in the 1960s his fierce poems against the Vietnam War got the attention of people who otherwise probably did not read poetry. I'm a little surprised that he doesn't get more attention in these parts as he is one of the leading American poets of the second half of the 20th-century and his Minnesota background figures in many of the poems—for example, "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings":
We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
To new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters, the boy
Tortured with the telephone generator,
"I felt sorry for him,
And blew his head off with a shotgun."
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and in your cup you will look down
And see
Black starfighters.
We were the ones we intended to bomb!
Therefore we will have
To go far away
To atone
For the sufferings of the stringy-chested
And the small rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.
I'm trying to imagine Bly's classmate Henry Kissinger reacting to a poem like this one. The two probably don't have much in common besides Harvard and longevity.
I googled "W Garwood Kleinhen," Kissinger's page-mate in the yearbook. He went on to get an MBA in 1952, also from Harvard, and served as president of the Harvard Club of Southern California from 1983 to 1985.
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