Today's Birthday

Today's birthday comes to you from the Writer's Almanac podcast. You can subscribe to it for free on I-Tunes, and each day Garrison Keillor takes about five minutes to tell us who had a birthday today, give us some information about anything significant that happened today, and then he reads a poem. You can also keep up at the website.     

Today is the birthday of poet Ogden Nash, who said, "Middle age is when the phone rings on a Saturday night and you hope it's not for you."    

And in honor of my father's upcoming 90th birthday, a poem from Ogden Nash about being a grandparent:   


                Come On In - The Senility Is Fine     

People live forever in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg and Tampa,  
But you don't have to live forever to become a grampa.  
The entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild,  
You only have to live until your child has a child.  
From that point on you start looking both ways over your shoulder,  
Because sometimes you feel thirty years younger and sometimes 

thirty years older.  
Now you begin to realize who it was that reached the height of   

imbecility,  
It was whoever said that grandparents have all the fun and none of   

the responsibility.  

This is the most enticing spiderwebs of a tarradiddle ever spun,  
Because everybody would love to have a baby around who was no   

responsibility and lots of fun,  
But I can think of no one but a mooncalf or a gaby  
Who would trust their own child to raise a baby.  
So you have to personally superintend your grandchild from  

diapers  to pants and from bottle to spoon,  
Because you know that your own child hasn't sense enough to  

come  in out of a typhoon.  
You don't have to live forever to become a grampa, but if you do   

want to live forever,  
Don't try to be clever;  
If you wish to reach the end of the trail with an uncut throat,  
Don't go around saying Quote I don't mind being a grampa but I   

hate being married to a gramma Unquote. 

When I was a Freshman in high school, my English teacher, Dennis Long (also my defensive line coach on the football team), told us that we were required in his class to do a lot of memorizing. We memorized lines from Shakespeare and some poetry that I still remember 45 years later. If you need to know how Invictus goes (Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul), or Stopping by  Woods on a Snowy Evening (Whose woods these are I think I know, His house is in the village though), I'm your guy. I am very thankful for Mr. Long's teaching. I have become more and more convinced that in our haste to modernize education, we may have done some harm by not requiring kids to memorize as much. I would read in the Math Teacher journals that memorizing was passe. "You can look up the formulas when you need them, why should students memorize them?" But I feel strongly that having those facts at your fingertips allows you to make some of those intuitive leaps that we want students to make. Critical thinking can't take place in a vacuum. You need some background knowledge to get started. I have a lot of what some people would call useless facts stored away in my head, but it makes me feel good when reading a book and a reference is made to Sisyphus and I know what the author is getting at. Yes, I could look it up (here), but it disrupts the rhythm of the reading. So, if you have nothing better to do today, try memorizing a poem. Maybe the one above  Or if you want a shorter poem by Ogden Nash, this one is somewhat famous:     

  Reflections on Ice Breaking

Candy    
Is dandy    
But liquor   
Is quicker