A Tribute to a Mere Magazine by a Great Man

"During the first six months in London, I flabbergasted the porters in the Chelsea apartment house by rushing outdoors hatless every time it rained, and just standing in the falling water. By January, however, I thought someone should go upstairs and turn off the water and the sleet and the snow and the cold. Even those lyrical outbursts by the B.B.C. weather forecasters, those poems-in-prose which made the foulest weather sound fair, were not enough; something more than "bright intervals" was needed to warm my bones.

Up to January, through summer's golden end and autumn's rainbow fall, I turned my back on the far-away Southwest, with no attacks of homesickness. Then one zero morning there fell through the mail-slot in the door something which swung my compass back to the Southwest, and caused the most intense longing for that dry and wrinkled land.

It was the Christmas number of Arizona Highways,* with a splash of spidery poinsettias on the cover. A well-meaning friend, a retired Santa Fe railway official, had sent it as a gesture of affection. It made me long for home. London in winter had become a foggy desert, while Arizona's landscape, pictured in the magazine, was paradise, no less.

Actually it was that brilliant number of the country's most colorful magazine that got me through London's worst winter since 1066. I used it as supplementary heat; not burning it, no rather by propping it open on the mantel and letting its pictures irradiate the room.

The blossoming trees were my favorites palo verde, yellow against the blue sky; and the ironwood, lavender against purple; both standing transfigured in the midst of the stark landscape, symbols of what a little water can do when poured on the earth at the right time and place examples too of what a mere magazine can mean in a man's life"

The Praying Monk...

Presiding with sacred dignity, Much more than an awesome silhouette of stone, This amazing symbol seems to be God's silent sentinel - praying - for us - alone.

This symbolism's deep portent Seems to say we should - indeed we must - Have faith in what we know is meant By the expression, "In God we trust."