I am trying to figure out something to blog about. I read a great review of some books about Mary Tudor, aka Bloody Mary, sounds like she was not such a bad sort after all. Isn’t that always the case? Richard III and now Mary – makes you wonder and realize how contemporary sources can be twisted to corrupt the record. I’m sure that couldn’t happen nowadays…
I watched that amazing wedding video the JKHeinz Wedding entrance on YouTube – pure, unadulterated joy. Anyone who blathers on about it being improper has serious happiness issues. Who says? I mean – let’s reflect on what music Jesus was listening to – should we limit ourselves to lutes and bizarre string instruments? I say – shake it up!
My family is blessed to own a small cottage on a postage stamp size island in Northern Wisconsin.
The Island
As a child, there was no television or telephone and because there were no distractions we did all those kid things: swim, catch frogs, swing, play in the woods… on the sunny days. Rainy days, however, were a different story. On rainy days, after we finished moaning and whining about having no television, we headed to the game drawer and started in on Monopoly marathons and my favorite game “Authors.”
We played ‘Authors’ day and night. We made fun of some of the authors’ portraits and we concocted jingles out of the titles. My favorite jingle was the one we made up for “Song of Hiawatha,” sung to a familiar theme played in all Cowboy and Indian movies of the 40’s.
Over the years, the stack of cards dwindled down to a mere shadow of its former self. Eventually, there were no more than a dozen. When I grew up and started taking my own daughter and nieces to the cottage, I mourned the missing ‘Authors’ cards. But, as fate would have it, while reading a magazine, I happened upon an article announcing a re-issue of the popular children’s card game. I ordered two sets and now I keep one in my dresser drawer and one is always in my purse. We never go to the cottage without them. Everyone asks as soon as we get in the car before we pull out of the driveway, “Do we have ‘Authors?” My girls love ‘Authors’ as much as we did as children.
My personal favorite card from the deck is “Idylls of the King.” As children, we often mispronounced this. My mother would smirk each time she heard one of us ask, “Do you have Iddles (rhymes with skiddles) of the King?” Finally, reluctantly, she decided to correct us, but we went on asking for Iddles, guffawing and snickering each time.
Do you have Iddles of the King (snort)
Within the past five years, I found an old, beat up copy of the book “Idylls of the King.” It is navy blue with gold leaf lettering.I bring it with me to the cottage, and whenever someone draws the card or asks for it, I whip out my copy and read a selection. Now we giggle and groan because everyone knows I will read a section out loud.
I am not the only one who thinks Tennyson should be read aloud. Radio 3 in the UK with be presenting “Idylls of the King” on July 12th. Apparently, as Michael Symmons Roberts tells us in this article,
Tennyson’s voice has been ringing in my head these past weeks, as I’ve been working on a new adaptation of his Arthurian sequence Idylls of the King for Radio 3. Not just Tennyson’s voice, but the voices he creates for kings, knights, maidens, fools and churls. This is poetry to be read aloud, and this was a poet with a popular voice. When a short, early version of the Idylls was first published in 1859, more than 10,000 copies were sold within the first fortnight. The more I worked on the poems, the more I thought of him as a radio poet before the age of radio.
I hope they create a podcast. I may decide to download it and the next time we are sitting around the table at my beloved cottage playing authors and someone asks “Do you have Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, I will hit the play button…
I have been glued to Twitterfall all week reading the words of the Iranian opposition. When I stare at the dark screen of Twitterfall, and the rolling scroll of plaintive instructions, defiant calls for change and cries for help, I picture thousands of moths drawn to a bright light. They are beating their wings against the windows of the world and it is breathtaking.
I am good. Not that I have always been this way. I ate an entire bottle of baby aspirin when I was two. My mother found me happily savoring the last, tangy precursors to Sweet Tarts sitting on the powder pink tile floor of our bathroom in my Pepto Bismol pink footie pajamas covered in raspberry colored chicken pox spots. God, I loved baby aspirin.
My mother, however, knew what roughly fifty baby aspirin could do to twenty five pounds so she scooped me up in my pajamas and rushed me to the clinic and they strapped me to a gurney and flew into a room and shoved a clear plastic tube down my throat and pumped my stomach before I could even say, “Hey!”
When I was done, while I waited for my mother to finish talking to the doctor, a kindly nurse asked, ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters? A kitty or a dog?’ and even though I did indeed have a brother AND a sister and not one, but two kitties, I lied. I felt very grumpy and retaliatory so I said in a typical terrible two sort of way, ‘No.” I wasn’t very good that day.
Fast forward forty nine years. The other night, I found my mother who is now forgetful, fragile, elderly and living with me, sitting in her rose pink pajamas on the edge of her bed, sticking her fingers in a bottle of cherry baby aspirin after she has already had her daily allotment. Even though I am often weary of changing the sheets and making sure she is clean and dry and her hair is combed, suddenly I am back on the pink tile floor. I am two years old again and I see her as she was, young and strong and pretty. I remember the feeling of her heart pounding against my head and I recall how she drove like a maniac to the clinic to get my stomach pumped, how she raced into the building like an Olympian sprinter and made sure I would always be safe and sound.
I sat down next to her on the side of her bed and I realized she wasn’t much bigger than I was then. I scooped her bird bone body up against mine and gently took the aspirin out of her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Keeping her with me is the only option I have because she was such a good mom and now, I try to be a good daughter because it is a giant circle and it’s all good…
“What’s in a name?” asks Juliet. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Yet, in this 60th anniversary year of Nineteen Eighty-Four (a brilliant title), you can only wonder about the fate of Orwell’s masterpiece if it had been published under its working title of “The Last Man in Europe”. And what about Portnoy’s Complaint (“A Jewish Patient Begins his Analysis”) or The Waste Land (“He do the Police in Different Voices”) or Gone With the Wind (“Baa! Baa! Black Sheep”)?
Would you have read Trimalchio in West Egg? How about The High Bouncing Lover? No? Then you would have missed reading The Great Gatsby. As far as I am concerned, The Last Man in Europe is the best of the bunch…
Paraphernalia 