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“Refresh” is the word prompt for Illustration Friday this week. I drew a quick one. It’s a good time of year to watch birds doing a little sun bathing, yes? Playing/sitting/standing in/sitting next to/etc. water is always refreshing to me.

Illustration Friday got a face lift this week! (It looks great, Penelope!) Check it out–along with all the other creative entries. And don’t forget to enter an illustration yourself. It’s fun!

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It has been sixty years since the bikini came to world attention.

In the summer of 1945 the Second World War was brought to an end with the two explosions of nuclear weapons over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The following summer the US military decided it would be a good idea to do a few more experiments with these kind of bombs to see just what happened when you did set one off.

So far there had only been three such explosions.  The first took place in New Mexico and was just to show that the thing would actually work—the next two were—as one might put it—used in anger.

The place chosen for the testing was a group of small islands well away from most everything except the Pacific Ocean.

If you look at a map and find Australia and then trace north you’ll come to a fairly major island called Papua New Guinea. Then shoot off to the north-east for two thousand miles and you’ll come to the Marshal Islands. In the north-western area of the Marshal Islands there are a group of islands surrounding a lagoon.

This is the Bikini Atoll.

The biggest island is only something over a square mile or so.

Before the bombs were set off there were actually residents on the islands, but they were thoughtfully removed before two explosions shook their world, one from the air, the other from underwater.

I say that these people were thoughtfully removed, but in fact there is a movement these days to try and bring world attention to the descendants of people like these, who were forcibly removed from their island homes.  Check out the book Island of Shame by David Vine.

With respect to the bomb tests, as might be expected, they caught world attention and just happened to be coincident with the emergence in France of a new style of swimsuit formed in two pieces.

But it wasn’t until the following summer, in 1947 that two French guys took advantage of the fad and introduced their skimpier style swimsuit and named it a bikini on the theory that it was going to attract as much attention as last summer’s explosions.

It took another winter before the English speaking world picked up the word—in print at least—The Oxford English Dictionary first citation is in Newsweek in June 1948 in a piece that actually suggests a countertrend against the skimpy bikini.

From what I see around the old swimming hole, the countertrend hasn’t made much progress.

There is an interesting side note here in that there exists a kind of one piece bathing suit called a monokini, as if the leading B I of bikini meant bi as in “two” for the two pieces of the bikini.

It's like Oz, where I'm headed -- somewhere over the rainbow. Places I've never been, people I've never met -- but no strangers. In Book-Tour Oz, we are all kin.

If you are making your way to this journal for the first time, you'll see I've been practicing, in anticipation of your arrival. You can familiarize yourself with the room by scrolling down this page.

You'll find the tour schedule on the left -- hope I'm coming to a theater near you! You can easily sign up to receive journal entries in your email inbox each day. (And you can easily quit whenever you want.) You can sign up to have this blog added to your feedreader. You can just pop in and visit when you feel like it. I'll keep the front room picked up and make sure there's a pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge.

Scroll down and you'll read about the road trip that intrepid Harcourt book rep Michael Hill and I took to The Happy Bookseller in Columbia, South Carolina last Thursday.

You'll read about my love affair with Sandy Koufax and the 1960s Los Angeles Dodgers and see how my admiration finds it way into ALL-STARS. (And take a look at the comments -- you'll see that I wasn't the only fan in love with Koufax!)

You'll see how I spent my summer -- and learn some about my family, Atlanta, and my new.... husband. (Hint: it's not Sandy Koufax. But he's fine...so fine... and it's his birthday today. Happy Birthday, Jim!)

You'll meet wonderful North Carolina teachers who are writing their personal narratives.

You'll find that I'm just as nervous about this tour as I say I'm not. Something like that -- do read "Shirley Jackson and the Book Tour." You'll find that I'm excited, too. Those opposites that Uncle Edisto speaks about in LITTLE BIRD... they catch me up every time.

And if you scroll to the bottom (not far), you'll read Pat Grant's thoughts on why THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS is a great American novel. Bless your heart, Pat.

Pat and Elisabeth Grant-Gibson own Windows, A Bookshop in Monroe, Lousiana. I met them on tour with LITTLE BIRD in 2005. These women -- and their staff, and their community -- are amazing. They host The Book Report every Wednesday morning -- "A scintillating once-a-week, one-hour radio magazine about books originating live from the KMLB studios in Monroe." Check them out!

I'm going to check out a suitcase. I'll be living out of it until the end of September. I can't wait to clap eyes on old friends, make new ones, and bring stories back with me to tell for years to come. I tell my students that every moment we live is our story. And each person's story is important -- it connects us to all of our stories. Walt Whitman knew it:

"Come, said the muse, sing me a song no poet has yet chanted; sing me the universal."