From the Salmon

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is 83 today.

That’s some trick!

It’s also Veterans’ Day. Or, if you remember back further than I can, Armistice Day.

In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut wrote the following about November 11:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

That a moment like this happened across continents only heightens the tragedy of the wars that followed. And while it’s fortunately almost too difficult to imagine a war like that now, it’s also sadly almost too difficult to imagine a day like Armistice Day.

On a more positive note, here’s another passage from the birthday boy that I’ve savored over the past few years. In the opening of his 1997 book Timequake, Vonnegut shares a story about his uncle Alex:

My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it.

He was talking about the simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

For years, that’s what I’ve thought in such moments. “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Well, with all due respect to the man who is one of my favorite novelists, I found a new saying this week. I’m still trying it out, but I like it:

Just breathe it right on in. Just eat it right on up.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Vonnegut.

Just eat it right on up.