Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Play’s The Thing

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My future daughter-in-law is visiting while she and my son make wedding plans and try to find an apartment. In between their running to and from appointments, she finds time to do her Shakespeare homework for school. She showed me her five-pound Complete Shakespeare that she lugged out with her from Michigan and I pulled out my beat up five-pound copy to compare. Mine has definitely seen better days.

Makes me think back to my young days when I first saw Romeo and Juliet, the Zeffirelli version. I was twelve. My friends and I sat through multiple showings because we were trying to see Romeo’s butt when he got out of bed. I was scandalized that he would really be naked under those sheets. But unlike my friends, that movie ushered me into a lifelong love of Shakespeare. I bought the paperback version of Romeo and Juliet and quoted the balcony scene for weeks. After that, I read all the comedies and several of the histories. I’ve never been a big fan of the tragedies, with one exception. Hamlet is my all time favorite play, with Cyrano de Bergerac a close second, even if it’s not one of the Bard’s.

Hamlet is perfect. He’s the perfect character and the play is perfect in construction. When my son was in middle school, he wanted to enter a school talent contest. He was thinking of quoting a poem, but I upped the ante and pulled out Hamlet’s soliloquy. Once we worked our way through it so he understood what was going on, he tore it up on stage. He said it better than anyone I’ve heard, and yes that’s Mom talking, but also a true Hamlet fan talking. I’ll pass on discussing my own lame version of Ophelia that I played at a Shakespeare festival. The poor girl suffered enough.

There’s just something wonderful about the wit and language of these plays, and sonnets. I find a lot of performances insufferably cute or horribly pretentious. So much so that I’m afraid to spend the money to see them. Best really to sit quietly and read them while the scenes play out in your head, try as you might to think of someone else besides Gweneth Paltrow playing Portia or Helena.

Shakespeare was the Michelangelo of wordsmithing. I almost wish he had also written prose. His language sweeps from coarse to sublime effortlessly. If novels more popular in his time, he would have, no doubt, written classics, though I suppose that he had a real love for the stage. It’s just amazing that the greatness of his writing continues to carry on. Just goes to show that excellence lives long after mediocre is forgotten.

My Century Cup

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 My grandmother was born a hundred years ago today. I know that because I vaguely remember her birthday, but really because I have her baby cup. It’s a very cool looking cup. The  base of the cup has six point to it so it flares out at the bottom. The engraving says, “Evelyn March 11, 1911 From Uncle Charles”. From what I remember, Uncle Charles was the rich uncle from New York who send expensive gifts.

The tradition in our family was that when babies were born, a silver cup was given to them with their name engraved. I think in my generation, it was my grandparents who bought the cups. When I was about eleven or twelve, it dawned on me that my other siblings had baby cups, but I didn’t. When I brought it up, no one believed me. There was a lot of discussion for a while until they realized that somehow, the cup was forgotten when I was born. 

That’s when my grandmother offered to give me hers. When she found it, it was dark and tarnished and there was a hole at the top where the handle had been broken. She polished it up and had it repaired. You can see the welding on the inside.

So I don’t have a baby cup with my name on it, but  I have something better. We were very close to my grandparents as kids so it was tragic to see my grandmother slip into dementia in her old age. She loved her fancy holiday dinners and I was always paid fifty cents to polish the silver, sometimes I got a candy bar. Invariably, she would have me crack walnuts and stuff them in to dates and roll them in powdered sugar for special appetiser. And when I was a real pain while she was babysitting, I was sent outside to pick violets along the side of the house so she could have some peace and quite. I never felt like I could get away with anything at grandma’s house because I was convinced that her two Siamese cats, Ying and Yang, who always watched passively, would tattle on me.

It seems like such a long time ago. I’m happy and a little sad to remember my grandmother, born a hundred years ago today. Gone, but not forgotten.

I Hear Daffodils Outside

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I don’t need to look at the calendar to see that Spring has sprung around here. The daffodils announce that all by themselves. It’s not hard to see how early cultures looked around at the environment to understand how it all started. The wolf and snake have unique characteristics that fit into stories of creation, turtles that support the earth, etc.

I can easily think of the earth having an inner child that lives through a cycle. In the Spring, he jumps up to play and brings out all the flowers in his exuberance. In the Summer, he roams around in lazy pleasure through trees and meadows. In the Fall, he starts getting tired and sits to watch the  fields turn yellow and the pumpkins ripen. In the Winter, he just can’t keep his eyes open any more and tucks in for a sleep, taking all the green and warm with him.

Our word for Spring comes from the Old English meaning to literally spring. Makes sense doesn’t it? We go from cold and leafless to sudden blossom in the blink of an eye. Spring leaps out as if the daffodils trumpet the change to wake up the earth child to come out and play.

But, of course, I understand that we live on a planet, perfectly sized and situated in our solar system to allow for an atmosphere and rotation that makes Spring happen. We have a protector planet called Jupiter that’s big enough to absorb errant collisions from blowing us apart. We have enough biodiversity to sustain life, despite our effort to progress. And I don’t think it’s all a happy coincidence of location and evolution. I’m absolutely firm in my belief that we have a God who happens to know a lot about physics and biology. I’ll take His intelligently designed Spring over randomness any day. It’s just so pretty.