Birthday Meme

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From Geoffrey Philp :

Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday, month and day onlyList 3 events that occurred on that dayList 2 important birthdaysList one notable transitionList a holiday or observance (if any)Tag five of your friends.

My birthday: March 253 events that occurred on that day:

  • 1300 - Dante descends to the Inferno in The Divine Comedy (fictional).
  • 1807 - The Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.
  • 1955 - United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" as obscene.

2 birthdays:

  • 1925 - Flannery O'Connor, American author (d. 1964)
  • 1939 - Toni Cade Bambara, American author (d. 1995)

1 notable transition (death, I presume):

  • 1988 - Robert Joffrey, dancer, teacher, and choreographer (b. 1930)

Holiday or observance:

  • In Christianity, March 25 is typically celebrated as the day of the Annunciation so long as it does not coincide with a Sunday or during Holy Week.

A place without dust

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Memorial Service for Winston Saunders

Friday December 8, 200610 a.m.Christ Church CathedralHow do you hold a memorial for a man who was so fully alive?When my father died, almost twenty years ago now, the months that followed his leaving us were bright with sunshine, the kind of sunshine that picks up dust motes and reveals what is hidden, but the light was cold and flat. Life went on — it never stops — and the winter that followed was as beautiful as winter always is, with clear clean skies and silhouettes to make your breath stop, with water the colour of, well, God, and air as light as it gets. Things were sometimes more beautiful, maybe because the world stopped turning so often — every time he came into your mind.What's happening to me now is a similar feeling, with a key difference. I had the opportunity to work with him, with Winston Saunders (this isn't the place to call him what I called him all my life, Uncle), and the loss is professional as well as personal. And both are immeasurable. There's a big gap in the warp of life and it will take a lot of time to close.The only words I could find to describe my father's loss, after the pain began to dull and the confusion began to clear, weren't mine. They were the words of Clarice Lispector — a place without dust, a place where something was once and isn't anymore.

Ordinary miracles to pry open the eyes of the blindhappen every day. Yet my deep faith holds:sun, wind, rain, and the dark nights will changemy Boschka's cinders to deathless apples and poems— Irving Layton

Tribute to Winston Saunders by Rex Nettleford

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TRIBUTE TOWINSTON V SAUNDERS, CMG

By Professor Rex NettlefordVice Chancellor Emeritus

Every society throws up in each generation persons of immense talent, intellectual energy and creative excellence. Winston V Saunders, legal luminary and cultural activist was such a person with talents ranging from playwriting and acting to musicianship and the sort of vision about culture and development. That vision and the actions that followed from it informed his stance on the building of a new Bahamian nation and the shaping of the self-directed society he wished to have tenanted by a confident, culturally aware citizenry with a sense of place, of purpose and of history to undergird the certitude which he saw an independent Commonwealth of Bahamas becoming.He made sure to marry a historian – Dr. Gail who is the proud recipient of an honorary doctorate from our University of the West Indies. As a highly respected Caribbean historian among her peers, she was his best friend offering to him the kind of support that true friendship engenders. Packed in Winston’s bags on coming to Jamaica and sadly to his untimely passing was her latest chronicling (along with Patrice Williams) of the conflict, controversy and control that attended constitutional and parliamentary issues in the contentious 18th and 19th century Bahamas.

For Winston, the natural scholar and student of Bahamian affairs, understood such congenital indulgences of his well-nigh ungovernable contradictory, contentious but exciting Bahamas which he cherished and which cherished him no less. It was that loving, compassionate, caring relationship with the history and existential reality of the Caribbean region as a whole which made him the most engaging of informed and witty conversationalist, the most engaged of Bahamian national and optimistic Caribbean man that he became. Such special attributes endeared him to all who had encounters with this civilized, hospitable, sophisticated, multifaceted polymath of a textured human being whom we will all remember and forever treasure.It was his understanding of the persistent historical features of both his own and the wider Caribbean society that drove him to Jamaica to participate in discussions about collaborative engagement in the commemoration of the abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which has had such a profound and lasting impact on the lives and being of us as a people of the Americas – that is ever since Cristobal Colon accidentally landed and was discovered by Native Americans on a Bahamian beach. Unfortunately, Winston was not to participate in the meetings that followed his arrival in Jamaica. But to his conscious end his mind continued to grapple with the awesome challenge facing his Bahamian compatriots in the quest “to be”, by engagement of a history of severance suffering and survival.It was beyond that survival that we both, along with kindred spirits like the late Clement Bethel his dear departed friend, often discussed throughout the 1970’s and since – always dreaming about a future that spelt hope rather than despair. So what a joy it was to visit the Bahamas to see Winston Saunders and to continue the never ending dialogue which had its full and robust, sometimes humorous, but always profound effect on life and living in our post-colonial Caribbean.His special talents and profound grasp of the centrality of creative energy to the building and shaping his society made him the natural fount of the richness of that sense and sensibility needed to inform the cultural development of his native Bahamas as well as of a philosophy that needed to bring sensitivity and sanity to public policy. He was certain of the need for appropriate institutions to give form and purpose to the innate creativity of his people as well as to preserve the intangible heritage of his fellow Bahamians. And, he was no less certain of the passion and generosity and magnanimity of spirit he felt was vital to strategies of growth and development through the engagement of the arts of the imagination working in tandem with the creative intellect -- individual and collective.The wisdom of the present Administration to engage his services as cultural guru and formally as chairman of the Cultural Development Commission, as well as draughtsman for the legal instruments that reflect the need to formalize but not to gird in an iron-grid framework either the exercise of the creative imagination or the general vision on how to have the arts of the imagination inform intellectual pursuits and public policy. People like Winston Saunders do not grow on trees! He shall be severely missed.All the more reason, then, to celebrate a life rather than to mourn a death. Winston Saunders would not have had it otherwise. And nor should we.

On the Passing of Winston Saunders

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Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good.W. H. Auden

Winston V. Saunders3 October 1941 – 25 November 2006

Winston Saunders was born 3 October 1941 to Harcourt and Miriam Saunders. He attended Quarry Mission School under the late Thelma Gibson, Western Junior School under the late Timothy Gibson, and studied piano under the late Meta Davis-Cumberbatch. He won a place at the Government High School, and attended under Dr. Dean Peggs and Mr. Hugh Davies, where he served as Head Boy. As a musician, he was Organist at the Church of the Holy Spirit and at St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church.He attended the Bahamas Teacher's Training College in Oakes Field under the Rev. Dr. Charles Saunders, and in 1964 obtained a B.A. Degree from London University in Classics. He returned to Nassau, and taught English at St. Anne's High School from 1964 until 1968.He married the former Gail North on April 15, 1968, and returned to London that autumn to pursue a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at London University.Mr. Saunders returned to Nassau to take up the post of Vice Principal at R. M. Bailey, a position he held from 1969 till 1970. He joined the Chambers of Isaacs, Johnson and Co. in 1970 as an Articled Law Student to Ms. Jeanne Thompson, and was called to the Bahamas Bar on September 19, 1974. He became a partner in the law firm of McKinney, Bancroft and Hughes, and worked as a lecturer in Law at the University of the West Indies (Nassau Campus). Between 1993-2000 he served Her Majesty's Coronor.In 1975, Mr. Saunders took up the position of Chairman of the Dundas Civic Centre, and served as Chairman until 1998. During his tenure as Chairman of the Dundas, Bahamian drama thrived. He oversaw the renovations of the theatre, established a repertory season, and under his guidance an entire generation of directors, actors and playwrights was raised. A consummate actor and playwright himself, he is best known for originating such roles as "Pa Ben", in Trevor Rhone's Old Story Time and "Maphusa" in Ian Strachan's The Mysterious Mister Maphusa. He also played "Zachariah" in Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot, "Peter" in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, "Midge" in Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport and "Charlie" in Larry Shue's The Foreigner — all on the Dundas stage. As a director, he brought productions such as Shaffer's Equus and Baldwin's Amen Corner to Bahamian audiences. He co-directed E. Clement Bethel's Sammie Swain with Philip A. Burrows in 1983 and in 1985 for the Command Performance for H. M. Queen Elizabeth II, and in 1987, co-directed the first Caribbean opera in English, Cleophas Adderley's Our Boys with Philip A. Burrows; in 1989 and 1990 he produced Dis We Tings I and II.It is as a playwright, however, that Mr. Saunders' greatest achievement was gained. He is the author of two seminal Bahamian dramas, Them and You Can Lead A Horse To Water, as well as a series of satirical commentaries on Bahamian life, the Nehemiah Quartet. You Can Lead A Horse To Water is widely recognized as the greatest Bahamian play, and has been produced in Nassau, Freeport, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Michigan, and Trinidad and Tobago.He is a recipient of a number of awards, including several DANSAs for playwriting, the Meta, a special DANSA for Excellence in Theatre, the Chamber of Commerce Distinguished Citizen Award for contribution to Culture, the Silver Jubilee Award for Culture given by the Government of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas in 1998.Until his death on November 25, 2006, he served as the Chairman of the National Commission on Cultural Development and chaired the Independence Committee since 2003. In 2004, he was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG). Most recently, his work was the featured presentation of the Bahamas CARIFESTA Contingent in Trinidad and Tobago.Original Post:

Some things you just can't write about straight away. Some things are too raw for writing, or at least for sharing.The death of my second father, Winston Vernon Saunders, on Saturday evening, is one of those things. It would be bad enough if we just had the personal connection with which I've grown up; but in the last four years, he has been my mentor and my balance, especially in the job of Director of Culture. People who know me personally will understand.

So for people wondering where my post on Winston Saunders' passing is, it has yet to be written. In the meantime, here are the words of W. H. Auden.