Children of the Days Read Free Page B

For a souvenir he killed one and pulled out its ivory tusks.
    The trip was a lot of fun.

May 24
T HE H ERETICS AND THE S AINT
    This day in the year 1543 marked the end of Nicolaus Copernicus’s life.
    He died as the first copies of his book, which demonstrated that the earth moved around the sun, went into circulation.
    The Church condemned the book as “false and altogether contrary to Holy Scripture,” sent the priest Giordano Bruno to the stake for spreading its ideas, and obliged Galileo Galilei to deny he had read and believed it.
    Three and a half centuries later, the Vatican repented of roasting Giordano Bruno alive and announced it would erect a statue of Galileo in its gardens.
    God’s embassy on earth takes its time to rectify things.
    But even as the Vatican pardoned these heresies, it beatified Cardinal Inquisitor Roberto Bellarmino—Saint Robert who art in heaven—the man who charged and sentenced Bruno and Galileo.

May 26
S HERLOCK H OLMES D IED T WICE
    The first death of Sherlock Holmes occurred in 1891. His father killed him: the writer Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t stand the fact that his pedantic offspring was more famous than he was. So, up in the Alps he threw Sherlock off a cliff.
    The news came out shortly thereafter in Strand magazine. Then the whole world dressed in mourning, the magazine lost readers and the writer lost friends.
    The resurrection of the most famous of all detectives was not long in coming.
    Conan Doyle had no choice but to bring him back to life.
    Of Sherlock’s second death nothing is known. No one answers the telephone in his Baker Street home. His time must have come by now because we all have to die, though it is curious that his obituary has never appeared in the Times .

May 27
B ELOVED V AGABOND
    Fernando passed away today in 1963.
    He was a free spirit who belonged to everyone and to no one.
    When he tired of chasing cats across squares, he’d hit the streets with his singing and guitar-playing buddies and rumba with them from party to party, always chasing the music wherever it happened to be.
    He never missed a concert. A critic with a cultivated ear, he’d wag his tail if he liked what he heard, growl if he didn’t.
    Whenever the dogcatcher got hold of him, a crowd would set him free. Whenever a car nipped him, the best doctors would take him in and treat him.
    His carnal sins, committed in the middle of the street, tended to be punished with swift kicks that left him limping, and then the children’s brigade of the Progreso Club would give him intensive care.
    Three statues of Fernando grace his city, Resistencia, in Argentina’s Chaco.

May 28
O ŚWI Ȩ CIM
    Today in the year 2006, Pope Benedict, the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, took a walk in the gardens of the city called, in Polish, Oświęcim.
    At a certain point the scenery changed.
    In German the city of Oświęcim is called Auschwitz.
    And in Auschwitz, the pope spoke. From the most famous death factory in the world, he asked, “And God, where was He?”
    No one told him that God had never changed his address.
    He asked, “Why did God remain silent?”
    No one pointed out that it was the Church that remained silent, the Church that spoke in God’s name.

May 29
V AMPIRES
    In the summer of 1725, Petar Blagojevic got out of his coffin in the village of Kisiljevo, bit nine neighbors and drank their blood. By order of the Austrian government, then in charge in these parts, the forces of order killed him definitively by driving a stake through his heart.
    Petar was the first officially recognized vampire, and the least famous.
    The most successful, Count Dracula, was born from the pen of Bram Stoker in 1897.
    More than a century later Dracula retired. What forced him out wasn’t the competition from the silly little vampires of Hollywood, which didn’t bother him in the least. No, he was tormented by feats of a