January 11, 2007
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THURSDAY, 11 JANUARY, 2007 
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Listen (RealAudio) | How to listenPoem: "I Married You" by Linda Pastan, from Queen of a Rainy Country. © W. W. Norton & Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
I Married You
I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.
I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of one of the founding fathers of our country, Alexander Hamilton, (books by this author) born in the British West Indies (1755 or some sources say 1757). He had an extraordinary childhood. He grew up on the tiny island of Nevis, where his father abandoned the family and his mother died when he was just a boy. But he was taken in by a local merchant, who gave him a job at a general store. He turned out to be quite good at accounting, so when he was 13, his boss took a trip to Europe and left young Alexander in charge of the store. He started writing on the side, and an article about a recent hurricane so impressed the adults around him that they all pitched in to pay for his passage to New York, where he could attend school.
He arrived in America just as rebellion against Great Britain was brewing, and he immediately began to write for New York newspapers in support of the colonies' rights. He impressed George Washington so much that he became Washington's right-hand man when he was barely 20 years old. After the revolution, when many American politicians believed that the colonies should remain mostly independent of each other, Hamilton was one of the earliest supporters of a strong central government.
In just three years, between 1787 and 1790, he served on the Constitutional Convention, wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, which helped garner support for the new constitution, became the first secretary of the Treasury, and set up the U.S. National Bank. He was challenged to a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. They met at sunrise in a wooded area of Weehawken, New Jersey, above the Hudson River. Hamilton showed up for the duel to prove his courage, but he purposely fired his gun straight up into the air. Burr aimed at him anyway, and Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the next day.
He hasn't been as well remembered as Washington or Jefferson, but by setting up the national treasury, the national bank, the first budgetary and tax systems, and most of all by helping gather support for the U.S. Constitution, he did more to design the system of government we now live under than almost any other man.
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