HOT AUGUST NIGHTS...

Neil Diamond wrote a rousing song, about hot August nights, called "Brother Love's Travellin' Salvation Show."

In my experience--or rather, memory over the last 60 years when I actually thought about weather--August nights in the Midwest were usually much cooler than July nights. In fact, it was delicious to sleep on August nights with a light blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Daytime could be hell-hot, but nighttime--um, lovely.

What has that to do with today's post? Well, not much, really. But August seems to have been one of the more history-crammed months--or maybe it just seems so to me. Here's a sampling:

August 4th, 1944 - Anne Frank captured, after her family and several others were hidden in an Amsterdam warehouse for 25 months; she and her sister, Margot, were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen and died of typhus. The famous diary has been published in more than 70 countries; a revision in 1990 contains material omitted in earlier editions.

August 5th, 1962 - Marilyn Monroe, about 36 years of age, found dead in her Los Angeles apartment; official cause of death was suicide from an overdose of prescription meds she took for depression.

August 6th, 1945 - Hiroshima bombed by U.S. using atomic bomb

August 7th, 1782 - George Washing creates the Badge of Military Merit, forerunner of today's Purple Heart citation

August 8th, 1974 - President Richard Nixon resigns.

August 9th, 1945 - U.S. bombs Nagasaki

August 12th, 1990 - Nearly complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex discovered in South Dakota; nicknamed Sue (for its discoverer, Susan Hendrickson). Sue resides in Chicago's Field Museum.

August 15th, 1969 - Woodstock Festival; Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater, et al.

-----

And that's only about half of the month. As might be expected, what makes history is often the most notorious or the most spectacular. I was pleased to find some "good stuff," or at least, "not-so-bad stuff"; and even the sadness of the end of Anne Frank's life is mitigated, for me, at least, by the survival of her diary; that one little book has been a blessing to many thousands, probably millions, of people to this day.

I can't find a not-bad place for the bombings; at this time in my life, they are just history to me. To many others, especially to the Japanese, they are atrocities. I have to accept them and move on . . . not condoning, just allowing them their place in history and how it has unfolded since World War II.

-----

My source was a website called Today in History. Worth a look.

-----

Until next time, blessings from

Thursday's Child