Epilogue

I wrote the following as an entry in the Plymouth Public Library’s contest for a new ending to “Romeo and Juliet” and was gratified to see it performed on the library lawn this afternoon. 

AFTERWARD

Enter Nurse and Friar Lawrence

Nurse:

A pretty peace we have, good friar, a pretty peace,

I know the Capulets and Montagues.

They did not give up wine, nor break their swords.

The streets are narrow; someone must give way.

This is the world no matter what we say.

A generation’s tears would sink a mighty fleet.

I tell thee Juliet was loved of old.

With these two breasts I suckled her

When mine own babe had died.

I heard her first sweet tinkling laugh.

I heard her babble turn to words.

And to these arms her first three steps did run.

Now tell me friar, although I know that thou canst not,

How did the prophets know if God were speaking in a dream,

Or if they dreamt He spoke?

If I were Abraham of ancient times, I’d fear the booming voice

Were but a terror of an addled brain.

No matter. Last night I pressed these bony knees to stone

And prayed to know the justice of it all.

And when I slept I saw the pair with children all around.

I saw them agèd in a bed,

Each snoring his or her own kind of snore.

I asked of God why this could not have been.

And then I heard a voice much like a choir

That said the couple had more joy

In one enchanted night than many married folk

In two long lifetimes feel.

“Where are they now?” I cried,

“Woke they in heaven to the rising sun

Without the danger or the fear?”

But God is God e’en in a woman’s dreams.

’Twas I who woke to silence in the heavy dark.

Friar Lawrence:

At least thou rose to pondering and doubt.

I would that Romeo had pondered long.

He saw as death what was a peaceful sleep,

And rashly fled a phantom soon to fade.

And Juliet so late from childhood come

Saw ne’er a hope in all her life ahead

And in stark certainty embraced the blade.

We two are given greater age

We’ve seen a thousand certainties

Into confusion fall.

Thou sayest God is silent,

Yet we’re blest by His commands.

Heed them as in thy grief thou plod along.

Plod on and ponder, doubter, plod and pray.

Beyond the darkling night there dawns the day.

A Treasure of Time

In the famous lyric to “September Song” by Maxwell Anderson “the days dwindle down to a precious few,” but the wonderful thing is that, when time grows short, you have more of it.  I was thinking of this on a lazy summer afternoon as I sat on the sun porch of my Mayflower Street home reading a book.

 

Perhaps you might say it was I who was lazy and not the afternoon, and indeed somewhere there were people rushing about getting things done. I’m fond of idleness; I confess it.  I remember the Fridays of my childhood when my grandmother would take me to her home in Hanover.  On Saturday I would be perfectly free to do anything I wished. 

My grandfather was a jeweler, a watchmaker, and a repairer of clocks.  He had a workroom where the walls were filled with scores of windup clocks and the sound of them all tick-tocking together was music I’ll never forget.  When the top of the hour arrived one would strike and the others chime in with a cacophony of dings and bongs. It was an event worth waiting for.  

Time was mine to use, and use it I did.  I would range the woods with Timmy, my Grandfather’s beagle who would give voice as he followed the scent of a rabbit.  I could see the use of a beagle in hunting because often the rabbit would appear close by, interested only in the rushing about of the ecstatic dog.  Had I been armed, it would have been an easy shot.

But the rabbits were safe. To my Grandfather’s great disappointment, Timmy was gun shy.  Grandpa tried to get him used to the sound by firing a cap pistol whenever he gave Timmy his food, but it only made the dog dissolve into a quivering mass whenever he saw a child with a toy gun.  Timmy never caught a rabbit, and for all his woodland yodeling, was as useless as I. 

And I was completely without worth.  I opened drawers full of interesting old tools, made swords out of scrap wood for the fighting of pirates, and watched “Space Patrol” on the snowy black and white TV.  Besides the house there was a great barn to explore. 

On Sunday, my mother and father would arrive, visit for a while, and fetch me home where my homework would be in my room where I left it. I would hear the sound of Ed Sullivan as I forlornly labored. 

Now I’m useless once again.  Like my grandfather’s workshop, the sun porch was a room full of time.  My book was non-fiction, but nothing that was liable to improve my mind.  Say what you will you achievers, you rushers-about, idleness is sweet.  The slower you go the slower is the movement of time.  You can look out the screened window at the sunlight on the moving leaves.  I know my time won’t last forever, but what I have isn’t being wasted – not wasted at all. 

Picket Fence

Back in Town

In from the beach, I’m rediscovering the beauties of summer among trees. Out there scrubby pitch pines and cedars give us a dark olive green, but we don’t have what you’d call leafy realms. Instead, the horizons are long, and we’re surrounded by sea and sky. 

There’s nothing wrong with blue, of course, and the sunsets reflected in the waters of the harbor are sublime, but evening light sifting through the branches and making shadows on lush lawns is nice as well.  I’ve been noticing goldfinches in bright summer plumage. 

Rainy days at the beach are beautiful.  We get a sense if isolation when the town waterfront disappears into the mist and the expanses of beach are empty.  Breaks in the showers invite a solitary walk. 

In shore the rain keeps things green.  Brown and crispy is alright for breakfast cereal, but not for the lawn. The sound of rain at night substitutes for the rush of surf.  During the intervals between showers, I walk down the street.  My neighbor’s picket fence is festooned with roses bejeweled with drops of water. 

  

Philosophy

My sister-in-law, the graphic design major, was saying that the bookcase in the dining room interrupts the flow and gives the area a cluttered look.  Annette, who is definitely a less-is-more decorator, nodded ominously.

Yes we have books in the dining room; we have them all over.  I find it pleasant to look at them, even if I’m not likely to read them in the near future.  When you’re recovering from a cardiac event, the distant future is cloudy and hard to see. 

Issues of feng shui may increase this summer’s contributions to the book table at the Antiquarian Fair, and among the possible losses to my home library is Plato Selections, a paperback left over from my college days. In it there’s a passage I marked with the intention of having it read at my funeral.  In those happy days I was an insufferable intellectual snob and imagined how impressed mourners would be to listen to Socrates’ ruminations on the nature of death.

When you're about to undergo cardiac catheterization, you sign a document that mentions rather bluntly that you just might die.  Although fantasies of proclaiming to my friends and relatives that I was a reader of Plato have passed away, I had some vestigial idea of facing the situation philosophically. 

Before the catheterization I was to undergo an echocardiogram, and a man who introduced himself as George arrived to wheel me on a gurney to a place where this would be done.  He was furious with the Republicans, who he thought might cut Medicare, causing the hospital to close and he and his fellow staff members to be thrown out of work, and he was angry at the Democrats for failing to oppose this disaster with sufficient toughness. 

He wheeled me to an elevator that was indicated to be out of service and reached under the paper taped over the button and summoned the car.  The stainless steel interior was scarred from collisions with gurneys like mine, but above and below the point of contact it looked as though it had been distressed with flailing chains.  The car baulked a little, then rumbled and rattled downward in its shaft.  Finally the door opened and we emerged.       

We were traveling down a long, empty corridor, and I began suffering chest pains, which grew alarmingly worse.  I interrupted George’s political observations. “I need a nitroglycerine pill,” I told him. 

“I don’t have one,” he said.

“Then take me someplace where they do,” I said. 

“Do you want to go back to your floor?” he asked. 

It had seemed like a long journey, and I remembered the elevator.  “Just take me to the nearest place where they have nitroglycerine,” I said. 

We entered a room where a crowd of people gathered around to stare at me as a person who didn’t belong.  George explained my need.  Someone took my blood pressure, which was alarmingly high.  A woman, who I later found was a physician’s assistant, saw the frightened look on my face.  “Don’t worry,” she said kindly, “you’re in the right place.”  So much for being Socrates calmly quaffing the hemlock. 

Plato Selections will be available for 50¢ at the book table of the Antiquarian Fair August 27^th at Hedge House on Water Street.  It has given me all it can.  I hope to be there to sell it to you, myself.

I still believe in philosophy, and when Death comes for me, I’ll do my best, but I’m not promising anything.