Writers Birthday Quotes

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales. And so on.Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like: Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales. And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?

Father, thank You for sustaining my life as You have. I know my days are in Your hands. Each day is happy and a gift whether it’s a birthday or not.

Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman's own productions, and that his article proves very little more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr. Morris's poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden; and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly.

During the writers’ strike in 2007, we put on our own SNL episode there with old sketches. Michael Cera hosted, our musical guest was Yo La Tengo, and we gave Lorne a birthday cake as he sat in the audience.

You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes. Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.

Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life.... What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too?

A writer’s brain is full of little gifts, like a piñata at a birthday party. It’s also full of demons, like a piñata at a birthday party in a mental hospital. The truth is, it’s demons that keep a tortured writer’s spirit alive, not Tootsie Rolls. Sure they’ll give you a tiny burst of energy, but they won’t do squat for your writing. So treat your demons with the respect they deserve, and with enough prescriptions to keep you wearing pants.

You haven’t gotten to the point of leaving a glass for her, too.” He covered his eyes but said nothing. She pulled away his hands, and then, looking straight at him, asked, “She’s alive, isn’t she?” He nodded and sat up. “Rong, I used to think that a character in a novel was controlled by her creator, that she would be whatever the author wanted her to be, and do whatever the author wanted her to do, like God does for us.” “Wrong!” she said, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “Now you realize you were wrong. This is the difference between an ordinary scribe and a literary writer. The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. We can only follow them in wonder to observe and record the minute details of their lives like a voyeur. That’s how a classic is made.” “So literature, it turns out, is a perverted endeavor.” “It was like that for Shakespeare and Balzac and Tolstoy, at least. The classic images they created were born from their mental wombs. But today’s practitioners of literature have lost that creativity. Their minds give birth only to shattered fragments and freaks, whose brief lives are nothing but cryptic spasms devoid of reason. Then they sweep up these fragments into a bag they peddle under the label ‘postmodern’ or ‘deconstructionist’ or ‘symbolism’ or ‘irrational.’” “So you mean that I’ve become a writer of classic literature?” “Hardly. Your mind is only gestating an image, and it’s the easiest one of all. The minds of those classic authors gave birth to hundreds and thousands of figures. They formed the picture of an era, and that’s something that only a superhuman can accomplish. But what you’ve done isn’t easy. I didn’t think you’d be able to do it.” “Have you ever done it?” “Just once,” she said simply, and dropped the subject. She grabbed his neck, and said, “Forget it. I don’t want that birthday present anymore. Come back to a normal life, okay?” “And if all this continues—what then?” She studied him for a few seconds, then let go of him and shook her head with a smile. “I knew it was too late.” Picking up her bag from the bed, she left. Then

Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing. Now, mind you, floating in nothing was comforting, light-less, airless, like a mother’s womb. This man was grateful. But then he decided he would love to have sturdy ground beneath his feet, so he would feel more solid himself. Lo and behold, he was standing on earth. He knew it to be earth, for he knew the feel of it. Yet he wanted to see. I desire light, he thought, and light appeared. I want sunlight, not any light, and at night it shall be moonlight. His desires were granted. Let there be grass. I love the feel of grass beneath my feet. And so it was. I no longer wish to be naked. Only robes of the finest silk must touch my skin. And shelter, I need a grand palace whose entrance has double-sided stairs, and the floors must be marble and the carpets Persian. And food, the finest of food. His breakfast was English; his midmorning snack French. His lunch was Chinese. His afternoon tea was Indian. His supper was Italian, and his late-night snack was Lebanese. Libation? He had the best of wines, of course, and champagne. And company, the finest of company. He demanded poets and writers, thinkers and philosophers, hakawatis and musicians, fools and clowns. And then he desired sex. He asked for light-skinned women and dark-skinned, blondes and brunettes, Chinese, South Asian, African, Scandinavian. He asked for them singly and two at a time, and in the evenings he had orgies. He asked for younger girls, after which he asked for older women, just to try. The he tried men, muscular men, skinny men. Then boys. Then boys and girls together. Then he got bored. He tried sex with food. Boys with Chinese, girls with Indian. Redheads with ice cream. Then he tried sex with company. He fucked the poet. Everybody fucked the poet. But again he got bored. The days were endless. Coming up with new ideas became tiring and tiresome. Every desire he could ever think of was satisfied. He had had enough. He walked out of his house, looked up at the glorious sky, and said, “Dear God. I thank You for Your abundance, but I cannot stand it here anymore. I would rather be anywhere else. I would rather be in hell.” And the booming voice from above replied, “And where do you think you are?

When I was an aspiring female poet, in the late 1950s, the notion of required sacrifice was simply accepted. The same was true for any sort of career for a woman, but Art was worse, because the sacrifice required was more complete. You couldn't be a wife and mother and also an artist, because each one of these things required total dedication. As nine-year-olds we'd all been trotted off to see the film The Red Shoes as a birthday-party treat: we remembered Moira Shearer, torn between Art and love, squashing herself under a train. Love and marriage pulled one way, Art another, and Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you. Or it would destroy you as an ordinary woman.

It is no surprise that weddings can be a little bittersweet for single people. We’re genuinely happy for our friends as they marry. But there can also be a sense of loss. It is the start of a new era for the couple. But the end of an era for our friendship. A single friend of mine in his late forties, recently said that the marriage of one of his closest friends felt like a bereavement. It feels as though you’ve been demoted. One writer, Carrie English, describes feelings of rejection that come when attending the wedding of friends. Two people announcing publicly that they love each other more than they love you. There is not denying that weddings change friendships forever. Priorities have been declared in public. She’ll be there for him in sickness and in health, till death do they part. She’ll be there for you on your birthday or when he has to work late. Being platonically dumped wouldn’t be so bad if people would acknowledge that you have the right to be platonically heartbroken. But it’s just not part of our vocabulary. However much our society might pay lip service to friendship, the fact remains that the only love it considers important, important enough to make a huge public celebration, is romantic love.

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre felt later, that in a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, 'not for its own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies proper to the aesthetics of Art.' The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new, though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to discuss here, if there were time; apocalypse works in Woman in Love, and perhaps even in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not n Apocalypse, which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking about in his assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are properly employed, and obiter dicta in which they are not, being either myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality; and what we feel about. all these men at times is perhaps that they retreated inso some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist, was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of common perception. But Ulysses ,alone of these great works studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concordmyth, the Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. And Joyce, who probably knew more about it than any of the others, was not at tracted by the intellectual opportunities or the formal elegance of fascism.

Stories survive not just because of empathetic characters that we can still identify with but because the author has something to say to us and they have the ability to communicate that to the reader in a clear and often amusing way. Jane Austen knows how to hook a reader with her endearing and often infuriating characters but she also keeps us hooked by her wit, her observations, and her unique use of language. Lots of other writers had books published at the same time as Jane Austen and yet they’ve been lost to us. Austen has survived because she has a unique voice. But the themes she explores are also important.

Character isn’t something that magically appears simply by virtue of having a birthday and a describable physical identity; it is something that is built by action and error, out of anxiety and a longing that compels great efforts in the face of eternal hopelessness. A character in a story fights to get what s/he wants, just as the dramatic writer must fight to penetrate his or her own stubborn habits, prejudices and expectations, to get to the heart of the story. Drama builds character - that’s why it exists, both inside and outside the screenplay.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The StarSpangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120. But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why? When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself — tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code. In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless: How could you be so stupid? It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind. The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these Groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear.

February 2 Donna Made a Difference Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.—1 Corinthians 10:31b Donna’s big brown eyes and sweet smile were like magnets drawing people to her. Her face had a glow that just can’t be described. Donna and I became good friends after meeting each other in a Bible study several years ago. My dear friend battled cancer for four years. She lost her battle, one day past her fifty-second birthday. Donna lived to glorify God. She always put God and others first in her life. Donna never complained about her years of suffering. When I telephoned her to see how she was doing, she always blessed me more than I blessed her. Donna never missed an opportunity to tell others the good news of Jesus Christ. Because her face glowed with God’s love, people listened to her. She shared the good news of Jesus to waitresses, to physicians, to nurses, to hospital employees. Instead of being consumed with her sad situation, she was concerned about others knowing how to have eternal life. Many people will be in heaven because Donna made a difference. I want to be more like Donna—patient, kind, uplifting, and always ready to tell someone about Jesus Christ. She was his faithful servant. She studied the Word, she claimed the Word, she lived the Word, and she shared the Word. Christians have the responsibility of representing Christ in all we do. We all need to be more like Donna. She did everything in the name of her Lord Jesus. She lived as Christ’s ambassador while on this earth. Today’s Scripture tells us that we should do everything for the glory of God. Glorifying God means that we give honor and praise to God. It means that we recognize His power and His importance. A good question that we might ask ourselves as a guiding principle is this: Will these words or this action bring glory to God? Do you make a difference?

And I like the mindless distractions, the way there is no room to remember anything about your life except that the osso bucco goes to the man in the bow tie and the lavender flan to the birthday girl in pink and the side cars to the student couple with the fake IDs.

My advice to young writers is, if you can’t marry money, at least don’t marry envy.

Campfires and birthday candles don't burn forever.

Your husband is doing this for your own good, they both concur. ‘Your own good’ was the mantra of my mother when I was growing up – it justified being force-fed laxatives once every three months, not celebrating my birthdays at school, curfews against travelling alone, refusal of permission to go to picnics. ‘Your own good’ was the reason my English teacher offered when she pulled me by the ear and led me out of the classroom, shouting rowdy girl rowdy girl rowdy girl this is for your own good and struck me with a wooden ruler. ‘Your own good’ was what justified my teenage neighbour putting his fingers inside my eight-year-old vagina to check for forest insects and bed bugs and evil imps. When I hear ‘your own good’ I am reduced to being a child again. I do not argue any more. I go silent.

Your husband is doing this for your own good, they both concur. ‘Your own good’ was the mantra of my mother when I was growing up – it justified being force-fed laxatives once every three months, not celebrating my birthdays at school, curfews against travelling alone, refusal of permission to go to picnics. ‘Your own good’ was the reason my English teacher offered when she pulled me by the ear and led me out of the classroom, shouting rowdy girl rowdy girl rowdy girl this is for your own good and struck me with a wooden ruler. ‘Your own good’ was what justified my teenage neighbour putting his fingers inside my eight-year-old vagina to check for forest insects and bed bugs and evil imps. When I hear ‘your own good’ I am reduced to being a child again. I do not argue any more. I go silent.

I will explain the main symbols in this book. There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me. There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone. Haiti is New York City, where I live now. The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.

PLENTIETH. Franklin P. Adams’s adjective of indefinite older age, as in: “He is about to celebrate his plentieth birthday.

Birthday Card To #Barbados You are 166 sq miles of sweet, undulating beauty- replete with richness and contradiction. I could never be all I am... without you, Never knew how hard I'd fall - especially when I am away from you. Happy Birthday, Bim

I had never known Bonnie to talk like this. So depressed and ... gnomic? But then I remembered it was her birthday, so perhaps she was mourning the way all women of our age were supposed to mourn the precipitous vanishing of our worth, like, Whoops, time to grow a personality, which the world will also devalue!

On August 12, 1933, President Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his laden airplane as it prepared to take off from the long hot runway. He left Cuba without any continuity of leadership and a smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana. American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday. This expedient political move failed to prevent the violence that broke out in the streets. Mobs looted and behaved with viciousness that lasted for six long hours and created a mayhem not witnessed since Cuba’s Independence from Spain. Students from the university ransacked the previously pro-Machado newspaper “Heraldo de Cuba.” The Presidential Palace was stormed and severely damaged, with the culprits leaving a “For Rent” sign hanging on the front gate. The temperament of the mob that rallied against the Machado supporters, including the hated Porristas who had been left behind, was ferocious. They wounded over 200 hapless souls and cost 21 people their lives. Five members of the Porristas as well as Colonel Antonio Jimenez, the head of Machado’s secret police, were summarily shot to death and trampled upon. The rioters then tied the mutilated body of Jimenez to the top of a car and paraded his bullet-riddled carcass through the streets of Havana, showing it off as a trophy. When the howling throng of incensed people finally dumped him in front of the hospital, it was determined that he had been shot 40 times. Students hammered away at an imposing bronze statue of Machado, until piece by piece it was totally destroyed. Shops owned by the dictator’s friends were looted and smashed, as were the homes of Cabinet members living in the affluent suburbs.

On August 12, 1933, Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his airplane as it prepared to take off from the runway, leaving Cuba without any continuity of leadership. A smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana. American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday.

Charlie nodded, like not getting it was valid. "I don't know how to explain it. But one thing's for sure. I'm not making you birthday doughnuts because your dad guilt-tripped me. I'm making you doughnuts because I'm grateful that you're here—for whatever you being here is doing to my life. And I genuinely want you to have a happy birthday." Ugh. One of those unwelcome tears of mine spilled over. And Charlie, like a reflex, reached up and wiped it away. Like you might do for someone you cared about. "Also," Charlie said, "I burned a hundred canned biscuits before I got the hang of this, so these little guys really are miracles." I gave Charlie the wobbly smile that happens when you try to shift emotional gears. Something was making me feel shaky. Maybe that I wasn't just a writer to him. Or that he was glad to have me in his life. Or that I was doing things to him—just like he was doing things to me. "You have to eat one," Charlie said then, putting his arm around my shoulders and turning us both toward the waiting donuts. "So many canned biscuits gave their lives for this moment." And now I really smiled. Despite myself.