Blow Out the Candles April 25

The Clown Prince of basketball Meadowlark Lemon is celebrating his 80th birthday today.

Jazz  and pop singer Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Virginia on this date in 1917.

Among her many honors, Ella won 17 Grammys and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Actor and comedian Hank Azaria is celebrating his 48th  birthday today.

Hank has won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his work in The Birdcage as well as four Emmys.  He's perhaps best known for being the voice of more than a dozen characters on The Simpsons, including Moe, Apu and Chief Wiggum.

Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser is 73 today.

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

Father

Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day—the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.