Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts on this day in 1912. One of her special skills was standing on her head. She stood on her head every year on her birthday to prove she could.

“I broke a whorl,” said Juliette, “I was seized into being by a sorrowful gesture, the way it carpe-diemed all over the as yet to be invented TV like relativity theory. Instant and simultaneous.”

She often looked stern but that was meant to fool anyone who refused to take girls seriously. She had already lost most of her hearing in one ear, and then she lost it in the other ear at 26 when someone threw rice at her wedding and a grain punctured her eardrum.

“The vowels in my mouth are red,” she said. She looked like my grandmother. When my grandmother died, we found no pink underwear in her underwear drawer whatsoever. We found only white. A little beige.