Welcome to Owl Chatter Post #990. (Not kidding.) I should probably think of something special to do when/if we hit 1,000. Nah. Still have time. Better put a call in to Armas, though. George!! Give Ana a head’s up.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay was a redhead, slim and beautiful, according to her description in the Writer’s Almanac today, her birthday. Eddie was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892, and her time with us overlapped mine: I was ten months old when she died of heart failure in October 1950. Yup, very pretty.

This heart-wrenching poem of hers is called “What lips my lips have kissed….”

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

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I’m jelly at a tearjerker, and my brother was worse. We’d be at a movie together and I’d glance over and find him weeping like a baby over, like, nothing. I guess my sister was the toughest of us, but Bon was pretty soft too, tbh. It was my mom’s doing, genetically; my dad was the closest any of us came to gruff. Alehem hashalom.

Anyway, so I wasn’t surprised when I found myself choking up, repeatedly, while reading Will McGrath’s beautiful essay on Minneapolis, in particular, his role in the resistance. It was in the Opinion section of today’s Times, on the back page, called (in the print version) “In the Resistance, We Drive Minivans.” He drove kids to school whose parents were afraid to leave their homes. Here’s a piece of it.

“Today I’m driving a girl who never speaks other than to say thank you. She’s out of the car now and trying to clamber ungracefully over a dirty ice bank that walls off the roadway from her house. There is no entry point — she’d have to walk down to the corner to gain access — and I’m cursing myself for where I’ve dropped her off. The skies are an unsympathetic oatmeal. It is very cold, the dark dead of winter.

“Out on the stoop of her building, the girl’s mom and little sister are waiting. The mother looks on nervously, wishing to minimize this vulnerable transition point between car and home. The little sister is probably 3 years old. She is in pigtails and wearing footie pajamas and she is radiant, leaping up and down, clapping, ecstatic to see her big sister come home. The quiet girl is stone-faced and stumbling, and eventually she makes it across the wall of gray ice to her stoop, where her little sister grabs her by the leg.

“I’ll admit: This was the only time I cried, throughout this whole disgusting affair, as I sat in my car watching the girl in the footie pajamas clapping for big sister’s safe return. For a half-second I had the instinct to punch the steering wheel as hard as I could. But I’m not quite so melodramatic, and I was worried I’d just beep the horn awkwardly and look like a fool.”

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Earlier in the article he writes that he was worried the cold would keep the protesters home, the prediction said minus nine. But 50,000 showed up. And McGrath wrote the following, which I’m sending to Frank Bruni (Hi Pam!):

“I was not surprised, had not forgotten that people in the North have been practicing for this their entire lives. Mention a negative temperature and the Minnesotan eye is liable to glaze over in reverie — it is a near-erotic sensation, the act of considering which fleece to pair with which shell, which anorak has the thickest fur-lined hood, whether it’s time to bring down the warmest warm coat from the attic, whether the heated vest is still charged.”

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I couldn’t watch the UMich men’s basketball game last night against Duke. I started, but it was too tense. (We lost.) So I switched to a Gnats spring training game and caught a few innings. Loved it! Got to see a whole raft of new players, including a big outfielder named Andrew Pinckney, who gunned down a runner at third from right field with a laser beam of a throw. Wow.

And we had to alert our Dirty Old Man Dept when the broadcast team introduced their new on-the-field reporter, Alexa Datt. Yup, Datt’s her name. Hubba Hubba.

Darn it — she turned, Phil. Try again.

That’s better. She’s a Marylander. Hard to believe she’s 40. Worked in STL for the Cards before coming home. Hi Alexa!

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Today’s puzzle was a little blah and everyone complained that it was too easy. Bible scenes were clues for book titles. Yawn. So, e.g., “Sodom and Gomorrah” was the clue for TALE OF TWO CITIES, and “Moses parting the Red Sea” was the clue for PRINCE OF TIDES.

Here’s Bruce’s great song, appropriate for obvious reasons. (“Samson and Delilah,” DANGEROUS LIAISONS.) Brace yourselves, ladies.

At 109A, the clue was “Rush uncontrolledly,” and the answer was CAREER. Here’s Commenter Gary: I did not know CAREER can mean to rush forward. For me it’s a synonym for “What happened to me? I showed so much promise, and yet, look.”

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Did someone say “Bruce?” See you tomorrow, Shoveleers.

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