Student

by Ted Kooser

The green shell of his backpack makes him lean
into wave after wave of responsibility,
and he swings his stiff arms and cupped hands,

paddling ahead. He has extended his neck
to its full length, and his chin, hard as a beak,
breaks the surf. He's got his baseball cap on

backward as up he crawls, out of the froth
of a hangover and onto the sand of the future,
and lumbers, heavy with hope, into the library.
"Student" by Ted Kooser from Delights & Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1812 that Napoleon's army invaded the city of Moscow.
Napoleon had hoped to conquer all of Europe, and he had almost
succeeded. He had invaded Russia in June of 1812, but the Russian
forces kept retreating,
leading his army farther and farther into the country.
The Russians practiced a scorched-earth policy of retreat, burning
all the farmland so that the French army wouldn't have any food to draw
on. The troops were exhausted and hungry by the time they reached
Moscow on this day, in 1812. As they approached, they found the gates
standing open and the
streets deserted. Then they noticed that all over the city, small fires
had started. The Russians had set fire to their own city. By that
night, the fires were out of control.
Napoleon watched the burning of the city from inside the Kremlin. He
finally fled when a fire broke out inside the Kremlin itself, and he
barely escaped the city alive. He began his retreat across the
snow-covered plains on October 19. It was one of the great disasters of
military history.
Thousands died of starvation and hypothermia. Of the nearly 500,000 men
who had set out in June, fewer than 20,000 ragged, freezing, and
starving men staggered back across the Russian frontier in December.

It was on this day in 1901 that the then
Vice President Theodore Roosevelt learned he had become the 26th
president of the United States, after the death by assassination of
President William McKinley.
On September 6, 1901, less than a year into Roosevelt's role as vice
president, President McKinley was visiting the Pan-American Exposition
in Buffalo, New York, when an anarchist walked up to him and shot him
in the stomach.
Roosevelt rushed to the president's side, but by the time he got
there McKinley seemed to be doing fine. He was talking normally and
even making jokes, and everyone assumed that he would soon be back on
his feet.
Roosevelt decided that he wasn't needed, so he went ahead with his
vacation plans for that summer: a camping trip in the Adirondacks. He
set out to climb Mount Marcy, the tallest mountain in New York. He had
reached the peak and was eating lunch when a telegram delivery man
stumbled up the
mountain to deliver the news that McKinley's condition had worsened
over night. A second telegram arrived late that night saying that
Roosevelt should get to Buffalo as soon as possible. His wife begged
him to wait until morning, since the roads were still wet and muddy
from the rain, but Roosevelt
didn't want to wait.
He and a young man hitched some horses to a primitive wagon called a
"buckboard" and set off down the mountain just after midnight on this
day in 1901. The ride down the mountain took more than five hours. When
Roosevelt reached the train station, just after dawn, his secretary met
him and gave
him the latest telegram from Buffalo. It said, "The president died at
two-fifteen this morning." At the age of 42, Theodore Roosevelt had
become the youngest president in United States history.

It's the birthday of novelist Hamlin Garland, (books by this author)
born in West Salem, Wisconsin (1860). His parents were pioneers who had
moved west to stake out some land for themselves. The family went
through droughts and floods and plagues of locusts, and had to move
around more than once. Garland thought he would
support himself as a farmer in South Dakota, but after three of the
harshest winters of his life, he decided to give up the farm and move
east.
He wound up in Boston where he began to write for the newspapers,
and he eventually decided that he wanted to write fiction about the
life of pioneers that he had left behind. At that time, almost no one
had written authentically about pioneer life. People in the East
believed that farmers lived
in the beautiful countryside and that their lives were simple and
noble. Hamlin Garland said, "There is no gilding of setting sun or
glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the
farmer's [life]."
In 1891, he published his first collection of stories, Main-Travelled Roads,
and within a few years he was famous. He went on to become one of the
most respected novelists of his generation, best known for his
autobiographical trilogy, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), A
Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), and Back-Trailers from the Middle Border (1928).

It's the birthday of essayist Barbara Harrison, (books by this author)
born Barbara Grizzuti in Brooklyn, New York (1934). She grew up with an
abusive father, but when she was nine years old, she and her mother
became Jehovah's Witnesses, and she spent the rest of her childhood
evangelizing. More than 20 years later, she came
out with Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses.