EVERYTHING THAT RISES

 From Garrison Keilor's lovely Writers' Almanac site this note of what to celebrate today:  "It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer (Mary) Flannery O'Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). She's the author of Wise Blood (1952); A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955); The Violent Bear It Away (1960); and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). Her novel Wise Blood, about a man returning home to Tennessee from World War II, begins: "Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. . . . Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in the section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn't think so too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn't reach the floor. . . . He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and stared down the length of the car again."

When O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus—the same disease that killed her father—at the age of twenty-six, she went home to live on her mother's Georgia farm, where she wrote much of her work."

My university was very big on both Catholicism and Southern Literature, and despite that fact i am a devoted fan of Flannery's.  so i may go pull  my Collected O'Connor off the shelf and read a story in her honor.  and mourn a life that was much too short.