Today in History: May 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

No one recorded exactly what Sojourner Truth said to the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, on this date in 1851. The speech was memorable, even if it was mis-remembered. It is known as the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, though a newspaper report from a month after, written by a journalist who was present, does not include that phrase.

Years later, a version appeared that captured Truth’s words but in a “plain-spoken” Southern dialect, which, many historians point out would not have been Truth’s accent: she was from upstate New York and Dutch was her first language.
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A Sunny Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My current crush and I will visiting the same local pond I wrote about a year ago in “Forever Snug.” It is Memorial Day weekend in the United States, and summer appeared here last week in the Mid-Hudson Valley with a surprising suddenness. Or that was just me not noticing things, a terrible habit for someone who types as much as I do. The column, edited to reflect 2016:

It was one of those days in which the lifeguards outnumbered the swimmers. We were at a local park that features a small lake and beach: on holiday weekends families travel to more prominent parks that feature rides as an added distraction. So the crowds were elsewhere even on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and we were one couple out of maybe ten groups. Two families, each with three water-loving toddlers, splashed about, and none of the children were yet old enough to test their limits against the flimsy, algae-covered nylon rope demarcating the “deep end” of the pond on three sides. The lifeguards chatted with the families, flirted with each other, bought each other ice cream, and burned off the ice cream calories breaking each others’ speed records chasing after the tuneful ice cream truck.
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Today in History: May 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.—Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961)

Walker Percy was born 100 years ago today.

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The Sierra Club was founded on this date in 1892 by John Muir and friends.
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