Good morning, readers and book lovers! Here we are on an April Friday, a mild, showery morning complete with a bird chorus singing "TGIF" outside. Quick--what does April make you think of? Why, Shakespeare, of course! Naturally. Legend has it that he was born on April 23 and died some 52 years later on the same day.
But before we begin our spirited discussion, let's have breakfast. Today we have granola sundaes, along with pale green tea--the exact color of my skin--with lavender honey and slices of fresh lemon. We're having this pathetic spread because after recovering from the 'flu I don't feel up to much. Cooking anything at all is quite beyond me at the moment.
So dig in--you know delicious fruit salad topped with vanilla yogurt and granola is good for you--and let's take our tea into the salon.
In the spring of 1965, while visiting the house that had been known as Hall’s Croft in Shakespeare’s time, I bought a pocket-sized book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna, who married Dr. John Hall, lived there with her husband until she inherited Shakespeare’s house, New Place, after her father died. Hall’s Croft became a museum: one can wander through the rooms, which are crammed with 16th-and 17th-century artwork, and then wander out to the gardens. It’s a delightful setting.
As was my custom at the time, I wrote my name, the place of purchase, and the date in front of the pocket-sized red book. When I read the introduction by Christopher Morley I was charmed by his idea of picking my 20 favorite sonnets at age 21, then coming back twenty years later to see which of those were still my favorites.
That spring in Stratford I was a month past twenty-one, so I quickly selected the 20 sonnets I liked most. It wasn’t difficult because at the time I was convinced that, of all the people who’d ever lived, Shakespeare was the only person who understood how I felt. I was suffering from a desperate case of unrequited love. On arriving in England to be met by some of my parents' old Singapore friends at Heathrow, I was borne off to their house in Surrey to stay for a few days. I vaguely remembered this couple’s children: one, a girl older than I, whom I hadn’t known well, and her younger brother, who was my age and had been my playmate. At home in the USA, packing for the flight over, I tried to recall this childhood friend but could remember only a pair of blue eyes in a sunburned face. (We were all pretty much sunburned in Singapore.)
Meeting him again after all these years I took one look and fell. Fell hard, as was my habit (this was by no means the first time I had fallen for someone unattainable). Of course, this unspoken passion produced the usual result--absolute zero.
So there I was, sick with love, wandering through Stratford and mentally reciting my twenty favorite Shakespearean sonnets. Walking the mile from Stratford to Shottery, where Anne Hathaway had lived, I paused on a little footbridge and looked at the brook rushing below it. I wondered whether The Bard himself had paused there some four hundred years ago. Perhaps he had, but it would have been a different footbridge: wood doesn’t last forever.
As I continued my wanderings around England I started composing sonnets myself, the subject of which was, of course, this childhood friend. Discovering to my delight that the Shakespearean rhyme scheme was far easier than the Petrarchan rhyme scheme that Keats had favored, I dashed off about a dozen over several months. Like everything else I wrote before the computer age, those sonnets have long since disappeared, and Goddess knows, it’s just as well.
I did open that little book 20 years later and found that a few of my favorite sonnets had changed. I wish I could cite them, chapter and verse, but I can’t; I’ve lost that little book. I mourn it greatly. It was falling apart but I still loved it. It may be somewhere in my house, waiting to be rediscovered if we ever move the furniture or sell the house altogether.
Of course I can easily buy another copy of the sonnets, but it wouldn’t be that little book, holding those memories. I loved it and lost it. Has this ever happened to YOU? Tell us about the book you loved and lost. Did you replace it, or do you simply recall it with wistfulness?
The floor is yours.