I celebrate as my onomastico, or “name day”, the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, August 29. “He must increase,” said the Baptist, “I must decrease” (John 3:30). I need that rule of life. St Augustine of Hippo (d 430) connected John’s sudden, violent “decrease”, his head’s removal from his shoulders, with the autumnal shortening of daylight, while the feast of John’s birth coincided with the vernal lengthening of days.
Speaking of shoulders, as I write I am in the “City of Big Shoulders”, as poet Carl Sandburg described Chicago, in defiance of the world’s other great cities, like London, Rome and Paris. As he explained it: “The poem sort of says, ‘Maybe we ain’t got culture, but we’re eatin’ regular.’ ”
