Just a Perfect Day
“You’re going to reap just what you sow.”
“Um, excuse me?”
“You’re going to reap just what you sow.” And he says it three more times.
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Tortured
This column was revisited one year later, in August 2016, here: “One Year Ago: A Public Torture.”
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The cane broke. Isn’t that all we need to know? The switch broke.
Raymond Johansen allowed himself to be tortured yesterday in solidarity with Saudi writer Raif Badawi. He was hit 50 times with a cane in Trafalgar Square, where public corporal punishments were once seen regularly but not since the 1830s. He had difficulty walking after and even expressed confusion as to where he was upon speaking with a reporter.
When a caning is administered it sometimes does not look as severe as one thinks a beating would look; even one of the words we use minimizes the severity: lashes. In writing about the Saudi Arabian writer Raif Badawi, who was sentenced last year to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison, I have run into this weakness of language. All language is analogy, and I have wanted the analogy to convey the pain of judicial corporal punishment. Few do. Perhaps none do. Raymond Johansen’s action pumped life into the analogies.
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Fire at the Mill
My dad, also known to the world as my father, is 80 today. Cape Cod, here we come! Here is a little birthday card I published a couple days ago. Happy birthday, Gad’s dad!
Some memories are of photographs and not the incident itself, but some feel to the rememberer like they are of a photo, with the details so clear and so accessible. There is one memory … I could count the rocks in the creek bed if I would just take the time.
My father was born 80 years ago this Saturday. If August 15, 1935, is known for anything, it is not the birth of my dad but for it being the date Will Rogers and Wiley Post died when Post crashed their airplane north of the Arctic Circle near Point Barrow, Alaska. (They may be the first celebrities to have perished in a plane crash.)
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The Gad About Town 