Today is the Optional Memorial of Saint Romuald, Abbot (died 1027). In the secular world, today is Juneteenth National Independence Day and Juneteenth National Independence Day (Observed).
Saint Romuald, Abbot (died 1027) was born about 951 at Ravenna, Italy; Romuald was of the Italian nobility and spent a wild youth. After he witnessed his father kill another man in a duel, he sought to atone for the crime by becoming a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, Italy. After some indecision, Romuald became a monk there. Led by a desire for a stricter way of life than he found in that community, three years later he withdrew to become a hermit on a remote island in the region, accompanied solely by an older monk, Marinus, who served as his spiritual master. Apparently having gained a reputation for holiness, the Doge of Venice Pietro I Orseolo accepted his advice to become a monk, abdicating his office and fleeing in the night to Catalonia to take the monastic habit. Romuald and his companion, Marinus, accompanied him there, establishing a hermitage near the Abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa which Orseolo entered. A wanderer by nature, Romuald established several hermitage and monasteries in central and northern Italy, and founded the Camaldolese Benedictines. The Camaldolese monks lived in individual cells, but also observed the common life, worshiping daily in the church and breaking bread in the dining hall. He tried to evangelize the Slavs, but met with little success, and spent the last fourteen years of his life in seclusion at Mount Sitria, Bifolco, and Val di Castro. The several branches of the Camaldolese Benedictines today live in several monasteries and hermitages in Italy, finding a fusion of community life and private devotional life. Juneteenth is the commemoration of the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the State of Texas in 1865. Though Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, 1862, with an effective date of January 1st, 1863, it had minimal immediate effect on most slaves’ day-to-day lives, particularly in Texas, which was almost entirely under Confederate control. June 18th, 1865 was the day Union General Gordon Granger and two thousand federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves. On June 19th, 1865, legend has it that while standing on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, Granger read the contents of “General Order No. 3”: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Former slaves in Galveston rejoiced in the streets with jubilant celebrations, and that day has since become known as Juneteenth, a name derived from a portmanteau of the words “June” and “Nineteenth”. Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas the following year; the holiday is one of the oldest celebrations commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States and has been an African-American tradition since the late 19th century. In 1996 the first legislation to recognize “Juneteenth Independence Day” was introduced in the United States House of Representatives, H.J. Res. 195, sponsored by Barbara-Rose Collins (D-MI). In 1997 Congress recognized the day through Senate Joint Resolution 11 and House Joint Resolution 56. In 2013 the United States Senate passed Senate Resolution 175, acknowledging Lula Briggs Galloway (late president of the National Association of Juneteenth Lineage) who “successfully worked to bring national recognition to Juneteenth Independence Day”, and the continued leadership of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. The day was recognized as a federal holiday on June 17th, 2021, when President Joseph Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. According to the bill, federal government employees will now get to take the day off every year on June 19th, or should the date fall on a Saturday or Sunday, they will get the Friday or Monday closest to the Saturday or Sunday on which the date falls.
Last night I continued rereading The Leper of Saint Giles by Ellis Peters.
Richard fed the cats, went to drink coffee, and came home. I woke up at 7:45 am, started my laundry, posted to Facebook that today was Juneteenth National Independence Day and posted to Facebook that today was Juneteenth. I started the Weekly Computer Maintenance and Virus Scan, did my Book Devotional Reading, put out the United States Flag, and ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch. I then did my Internet Devotional Reading. I finished my laundry. At `12:30 pm I went to Walmart, and got two long light shawls (one white, one black) and household items and groceries, then I got groceries at Champagne’s. I arrived home at 1:15 pm. I did some Advance Daily Update Drafts for this weblog, and the Weekly Computer Maintenance and Virus Scan finished. I continued reading Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong. We watched Jeopardy! and News, then ate dinner at D.C.’s. When we got back I put the schedule for the New Orleans Saints into my calendar, and then we watched Northern Exposure S4E20 “Homesick” (1993). And I will now finish this Daily Update, do some reading, and go to bed.
With no Saints to honor, tomorrow is the date of the Summer Solstice, which marks either the Beginning or the Middle of Summer (it’s been Summer in SouthWestCentral Louisiana for a good month, already), West Virginia Day (1863) and World Refugee Day.. It is also the birthday of my former neighbor Pam, who is the mother of several of the former Assembled (the friends of my kids who used to hang out here) (1959). If I do not work on my plants today, I will do so on Saturday. The Summer Solstice will arrive at 3:05 pm.
Our Parting Quote on this Wednesday Evening comes to us from James Salter, American author (died 2015). Born as James Horowitz in 1925 in Passaic, New Jersey, his father was a real estate broker and businessman, who had graduated from West Point in November 1918 as World War I was ending and who had served briefly in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Horowitz grew up in Manhattan. While he had planned to study at Stanford University or MIT, he entered West Point on July 15th, 1942, at the urging of his father, who had rejoined the Corps of Engineers in July 1941 in anticipation of war breaking out. Like his father, Horowitz’s time at West Point was shortened due to wartime class sizes being greatly increased and the curriculum drastically shortened. He graduated in 1945 after just three years, ranked forty-ninth in general merit in his class of eight hundred and fifty-two. He completed flight training during his first class year, with primary flight training at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and advanced training at Stewart Field, New York. On a cross-country navigation flight in May 1945, his flight became scattered and, low on fuel, he mistook a railroad trestle for a runway, crash-landing his T-6 Texan training craft into a house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Possibly as a result, he was assigned to multi-engine training in B-25s until February 1946. He received his first unit assignment with the 6th Troop Carrier Squadron, stationed at Nielson Field, the Philippines; Naha Air Base, Okinawa; and Tachikawa Air Base, Japan. He was promoted to 1st lieutenant in January 1947. Horowitz was transferred in September 1947 to Hickam AFB, Hawaii, then entered post-graduate studies at Georgetown University in August 1948, receiving his master’s degree in January 1950. He was assigned to the headquarters of Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Virginia, in March 1950, where he remained until volunteering for assignment in the Korean War. Horowitz married in 1951 and had four children. He arrived in Korea in February 1952 after transition training in the F-86 Sabre with the 75th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Presque Isle Air Force Base, Maine. He was assigned to the 335th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, a renowned MiG-hunting unit. He flew more than one hundred combat missions between February 12th and August 6th, 1952 and was credited with a MiG-15 victory on July 4th, 1952. Horowitz subsequently was stationed in Germany and France, promoted to major, and assigned to lead an aerial demonstration team; he became a squadron operations officer, in line to become a squadron commander. In his off-duty time, he wrote his first novel, The Hunters, publishing it in 1956 under the pen name James Salter. The film rights to the novel allowed Horowitz to leave active duty with the United States Air Force in 1957 to write full time. He also legally changed his name to Salter. The 1958 film adaptation of The Hunters, starring Robert Mitchum, was honored with acclaim for its powerful performances, moving plot, and realistic portrayal of the Korean War. Although an excellent adaptation by Hollywood standards, it was very different from the original novel, which dealt with the slow self-destruction of a thirty-one-year-old fighter pilot, who had once been thought a “hot shot” but who found only frustration in his first combat experience while others around him achieved glory, some of it perhaps invented. Salter’s 1961 novel The Arm of Flesh drew on his experiences flying with the 36th Fighter-Day Wing at Bitburg Air Base, Germany, between 1954 and 1957. An extensively-revised version of the novel was reissued in 2000 as Cassada. Salter however, later disdained both of his Air Force novels as products of youth “not meriting much attention.” After several years in the Air Force Reserve, he severed his military connection completely in 1961 by resigning his commission after his unit was called up to active duty for the Berlin Crisis. He moved back to New York with his family. Salter was critical of his own work, having said that only his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime came close to living up to his standards. Salter and his first wife divorced in 1975. Starting in 1976 he lived with journalist and playwright Kay Eldredge, and they had one child. He wrote a Hollywood script for Robert Redford, who had commissioned and then rejected it; Salter turned the script into his 1979 novel book Solo Faces. Salter published a collection of short stories, Dusk and Other Stories, in 1988. The collection received the PEN/Faulkner Award, and one of its stories (“Twenty Minutes”) became the basis for the 1996 film Boys. He wrote his memoir, Burning the Days, in 1997. Salter and Eldredge married in Paris in 1998. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. Eldredge and Salter co-authored a book entitled Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days, in 2006. In 2012 PEN/Faulkner Foundation selected him for the 25th PEN/Malamud Award saying that his works showed the readers “how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn”. His final novel, All That Is, was published to excellent reviews in 2013. In the fall of 2014 Salter became the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia; that same year he was awarded the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature award (died 2015): “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”
From The Recamier 