Elvis

Some more testimony on the tight-knit relationship between Elvis and his mother.

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Mrs. Faye Harris was a friend of the Presleys when they lived in Tupelo. “Gladys thought Elvis was the greatest thing that ever happened,” Mrs. Harris recalls, “and she treated him that way. She worshipped that child from the day he was born until the day she died. She’d always keep him at home or, when she let him go out and play, she was always out looking to see that he was all right. And wherever she went - whether it was out visiting or even down to the grocery store - she always had her little boy along.”

-- “Elvis: What happened?” by Steve Dunleavy

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Morning Walk

The only reason why I went on my morning walk was because I was due for a shower, and I didn't want to shower in the evening, and taking a shower in the morning without having gone on a walk would seem too lazy and fallen.

Yet, as I half-expected, when I was back home and showered up, I really felt pretty good.

I changed the routine a little. So long as I am going on a walk, I thought I'd favor the exercise content of it a little more. I still take my book and get a little reading done, but I am now reading less than half of what I had been doing. I still won't lose weight this way, but I am giving my body a stronger reminder of what it is for.

Thomas Jefferson in France

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When Jefferson went to France in 1784, succeeding Ben Franklin as U.S. minister - the word ambassador was still eschewed as a vestige of monarchy - he had firsthand experience of an absolutist government. “The truth of Voltaire’s observation offers itself perpetually that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil,” he told a friend. To George Washington, he expressed himself as unequivocally, “I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so since I have seen what they are.” His French sojourn radicalized Jefferson and left him with a heightened suspicion of the damage that could be done by any aristocratic or monarchical sympathies in America - suspicions that were to crystallize around the figure of Alexander Hamilton.

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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