| How Baseball Saved My Marriage
by Kristen Lindquist
One happy hour drink in Orono and now I'm driving
up the Penobscot just for kicks, past the bridge to Indian Island,
past the just-closed Georgia Pacific plant, tidy yards
of Milford, "Place of a Million Parts" junkyard,
the drink still warm in my belly, the strong, true edge of things
glowing with rich clarity in the late summer, late afternoon light.
Dylan's tangled up in blue on the radio, dozens of migrating
nighthawks flit over fields along the river, crickets shrill
in tall grass, window draft tickles my tan shoulders.
Later tonight, the Red Sox will win with another Big Papi
walk-off homer that will make me whoop to myself in the car.
But for now, I'm moving through Olamon, Passadumkeag,
away from the river, into the woods. It's the end of a long day,
but there still seems to be plenty of time and road ahead.
Something about the light, the beauty of the sky, makes me think
I should keep going right on to northern Maine, all the way
to Canada. I could just keep driving all night, potato fields
north of Houlton balancing the dark outside my car windows,
lights across the St. John beckoning me over the border.
I've got a full tank of gas, credit cards in my wallet. I could
drive all the way to Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island,
stay in some quaint inn on a craggy coast, walk low beaches
in search of sandpipers heading south from the Arctic.
How far north do roads go? But it grows late, shadows deepen,
and so far from home, I realize I don't know the station
broadcasting tonight's game. So it's finally baseball
that curbs my sudden wanderlust. It's the simple pleasure
of a good game coming up that makes me turn around
to re-enter the bubble of radio reception, to start
the long drive back to everything familiar and well-loved.
"How Baseball Saved My Marriage" by Kristen Lindquist, from Transportation, published by Megunticook Press © 2011 Kristen Lindquist. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) On this date in 1896 a young electrical engineer named Henry Ford completed and successfully tested his first experimental automobile. He called it the "Quadricycle," because it rolled around on four bicycle tires. He'd been working on it for two years out in the shed behind his house on Bagley Avenue in Detroit. It was finally ready to test when he hit an unexpected snag: It was too wide to fit through the workshop's door. Ford took an ax to the doorframe and the surrounding bricks and was soon rolling down Grand River Avenue. The Quadricycle had a two-cylinder, four-horsepower engine and could achieve speeds up to 20 miles per hour. It had two gears and no brakes. It ran on pure ethanol and it was steered by the means of a tiller, like a boat. It wasn't much to look at, just a 500-pound skeleton with a steel frame and no body. But the first test drive was a success. On this date in 1919 the 19th Amendment passed the Senate. Fifteen months later, it was ratified by the necessary 36 state legislatures, giving American women the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony drafted the original amendment, with the help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and it was first formally introduced in 1878. It sat in committee for nine years before it went before the Senate in 1887 and was voted down. Over the next decades several individual states approved women's voting rights but a Constitutional amendment wasn't considered again until 1914. It was repeatedly defeated and an anti-suffrage movement campaigned against it claiming that it was unfeminine for women to venture outside their natural domestic sphere. But in 1918 Woodrow Wilson threw his support behind the suffrage movement. Women had entered the workforce in large numbers during World War I, and in a speech that President Wilson gave in September 1918, he said: "We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of right?" The amendment passed both Houses of Congress the following May. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 