Word: mud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Scott and Zelda expected nothing but joy out of life and quarreled bitterly when they were disappointed. "We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promises of American advertising," Zelda once said. "I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail, and that mud will give you a perfect complexion." After Zelda became ill, Fitzgerald said. "I left my capacity for hoping on the little road that led to Zelda's sanitarium." He wrote her: "Do you remember before keys turned in locks, when life was a closeup and not an occasional letter, that...
...Paraguayan town of Pedro Juan Caballero and the Brazilian town of Ponta Porã doze in the green, rolling forests of the Amambay plateau. A broad, straight strip of grass between the red-roofed towns marks the international border. But they really form a single frontier community of bearded, mud-stained Gauchos, Syrian merchants, Redemptorist priests, barefoot women, and soldiers in faded green uniforms...
When Isaac Emanuelovich Babel was ten years old, he saw his father kneel in the mud before a mounted Cossack captain and beg for help while an Odessa mob looted and wrecked the family store. "At your service," the officer said, touched his lemon-yellow chamois glove to his cap, and rode off passionlessly, "not looking right or left . . . as though through a mountain pass, where one can only look ahead." Torn with pity and terror for his father, the boy was also stirred by a sneaking admiration for the Cossack, with his instinctive animal grace and his life...
Born in 1894, in an era of sanctioned pogroms, Babel did not need to see his father in the mud to have a firsthand knowledge of the ordeal of a Russian Jew. In The Story of My Dovecot, Babel tells how his dearest childhood dream was to own some pigeons. One day the excited ten-year-old is racing home with his first set of birds, when a pogrom erupts. A crippled dealer in stolen Jewish goods grabs the boy's sack, and, opening it in disgust, smashes one of the pigeons against the boy's face...
...plains of Piedmont. This ruled out all except three passes. To pick the one that Hannibal took, Sir Gavin used ancient evidence that the army found new snow in the pass and also old snow from the preceding year. Climatological data, based on pollen grains found in ocean-bottom mud, prove that the climate of Europe in Hannibal's time was slightly warmer than it is today. This being the case, only the pass of Traversette, 10,000 feet high, could have plagued Hannibal's elephants with old snow. Sir Gavin investigated the Col de la Traversette...