From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.[link to en tire proclamation]

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it a national holiday in the U.S. in 1914. [link to article on U.S. Mother’s Day]

All of this is a preamble to linking Gail Collins’ column from yesterday pointing out that today is also coincidentally  the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill.

“What Every Girl Should Know” by Gail Collins [link]

Gail Collins’s article is well worth reading.

I have a busy day today. Besides the usual church stuff, I  have two Moms that I need to connect with today. Both my Mom and my Mother-in-law lost their husbands within the last year. Today is a good time to reach out to them. So after my post service rehearsal, Eileen and I will jump into the car and drive to Whitehall for a little Hatch Mother’s Day celebration.

This is an annual affair for this family. Eileen asked me to make a peach pie for the occasion which I dutifully did. I also made a blueberry pie with the idea of giving it to our sort of new neighbors. But Eileen found out that quite a crew is coming to the Hatch affair so we are taking both pies to that.

Then after we get back we are taking my Mom for supper probably at the 8th Street Grill.

I have been reading a bunch lately.

I’m on page 293 of this tome. I count 631 pages of prose in it (there’s lots of notes and other stuff after that). So I guess I’m almost half way.

I keep thinking of “War and Peace” by Tolstoy as I read this. Both books describe stuff that is unthinkable to me. The Mao book seems to have a reputation for being exaggerated. It well may be. But at the same time it corrects many of my own misconceptions about the history of Communist China and Mao.

I am almost done re-reading Burgess’s “The Long Day Wanes” Trilogy.

My little paperback doesn’t look like this. It’s black with huge yellow type. I have had it for a very long time. I was just thinking last night how satisfying it can be to read an old beat up paperback.

The first volume is “Time for a Tiger.” A “Tiger” is a beer.  Wiki says it was Burgess first published book.  I mostly remember Nabby Adams from my first read. He is addicted to warm beer.

This is the second volume which I have also finished reading for a second time recently. While reading it, I was interested to read about the Muslims in Malaya from a 50s Brit point of view.  Much different than the current Western Stereotypes. Speaking of which, apparently Burgess was appalled by the cover above. Wiki says “He wrote in his autobiography (Little Wilson and Big God, p. 416): “The design on [the] dust-jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover-designer, for that blatant display of ignorance.”

So I’m now reading this one. I just learned this from Wiki as well:

“The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 6: “The beds i’ the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call’d me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain’d by ‘t.”

How bout that?

I have to quit blogging so that I can treadmill before this long arduous day.