This poem is part of a book-length manuscript on which I am currently working titled The Evening Times. The titles of all of the poems in this collection come from headlines or advertisements in central New York newspapers published from the 1870s through the 1980s. In some cases, the titles suggested the poems that followed; in others, I had already written the poems and then found their titles later. I wrote this poem long before I found a title for it, and in its first several drafts the second stanza was longer. As I was fishing for titles in the 1874 editions of the Herkimer Democrat and Little Falls Gazette, I stumbled across a brief article about the death of a four-year-old boy on a canal boat. I was struck by its sadness, and after some time I realized that that boy’s story would serve well in place of some of the material in my original second stanza. So I cut that stanza down and added the long stanza about four-year-old George Curtis, fictionalizing a great deal but maintaining the general outline of what had actually happened to him. It was important to me to show something real about the hardships and tragedies of the historical era, which of course are not featured in the contemporary celebrations. On the other hand, though, I wanted to be sure that those who attend such celebrations (and I am one of them, at least occasionally) aren’t faulted for their attendance, or even enthusiasm; in the face of stories like George’s, it’s natural to turn to something more joyful, even if it sometimes seems artificial or incongruous.