Every Third Thought (3 page)

The history-drenched Baltic, new to us Newett/Todds, who though no strangers to the Mediterranean, Aegean, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and other European seas and/or seacoasts, had never till now ventured upon this one, a favorite for summertime cruisers. Their typical itinerary, Mandy had explained back home long since, would be from Stockholm to Estonian Tallinn, thence up the Gulf of Finland for an extended stopover in St. Petersburg, then back to Helsinki and other ports, sailing mainly by night and shore-excursioning by day (a
welcome respite for cabin stewards and suchlike shipboard service personnel) until the voyage’s end in Copenhagen. But pleased as we’d have been to tour the canals and onion-domes of Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
, she had elected instead to fetch us from Stockholm straight down to Polish Gdańsk (with an interim stopover at the charming medieval island-port of Visby), thence west to Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and on to Shakespeare Land.

And that’s enough traveloguing: Suffice it to say that thanks to Mandy’s homework and judicious planning we quickly shed our reverse-snob cruise-ship prejudice and quite enjoyed both vessel and voyage. Disembarked at Dover’s famed white cliffs, vowing to Do This Again Sometime down our road—maybe on the same just-right-for-us ship (neither overwhelmingly large, like some of the super-behemoths one saw in harbor, nor small enough to enforce intimacy with the likes of those Hadleys), maybe from Dover down the coasts of France and Portugal and on around Iberia to Nice or Monte Carlo, once the pair of us were pensioners? Were met dockside by driver prearranged by M. and by him fetched through rolling, sheepflocked Kentish countryside to Canterbury, which Chaucer’s tale-telling pilgrims never quite reach in his uncompleted
Tales
, but we T/Ns duly did. Regained our shore-legs among the half-timbered houses and the great old cathedral, paying our respects to Geoffrey C. both as poet and as talester: no Failed Old Fart he, despite his failing to fetch his fictive folk to their destination! Then bypassed London, whereto we’d be returning
anyhow for the flight home, and contrived somehow by bus, train, and taxicab (ask Mandy) to haul our tandem tushies and assorted luggage up to Warwickshire’s Stratford-on-Avon and Stratford-upon-same, which is where this long-stalled story (finally!) starts....

 

On a certain mild but drizzly, quite English-feeling late September Saturday morn—first day of fall and seventy-seventh anniversary, as has been noted, of George Irving Newett’s expulsion from maternal womb in Bridgetown, MD USA—he and his soul-mate wake in their somewhat cramped but cozy bedand-breakfast in Stratford-upon’s Bridgetown, make happy birthday love in its (too small for us Amurkans) double bed, “break fast” with good Brit tea and scones, and, thus properly B&B’d, set out under borrowed umbrellas across the B’townto-Stratford bridge into “Upon,” as we’d come to call it. Being us, we decline the “Shakespearience” guided tour of the Bard’s birthplace, later residence, and final resting place in Holy Trinity Church, preferring to touch those bases at our own unsupervised clip. We happen to be, both of us,
literal
touchers of stuff that we venerate: not paintings, of course, but items unlikely to be damaged (in our opinion, if not that of museumguards and tour-guides) by the odd respectful body-contact. In Spain, for instance, touring the Cervantes residence-museum in Alcalá de Henares some decades past, G.I.N. had presumed actually to sit at what was advertised to be the master’s desk, his butt in the very chair that Don Miguel was said to have
honored with his while penning
Don Quixote
, and had felt as moved thereby as a True Believer might feel at touching the bronze robe-hem of a patron saint’s statue. Likewise Amanda, back there in Canterbury, had caressed the granite walls of the cathedral right through a beautiful Evensong recital, paying homage not to Gee-dash-Dee but to the splendid architecture, music, and other art inspired by His various religions—along with Crusades, Inquisitions, Jihads, and the like. To the objection that even such respectful, reverential touching does damage over time, we reply with what we once overheard a fellow tourist remark at the sight of a famous old crucifix’s marble Jesus-toes worn down by the kisses of the faithful: “If lips can do that to stone, think what stone must do to lips!”

An example of which, changes changed, will now befall (perpend that verb) the writer of these lines. Down Stratford’s handsome Henley Street we make our way, the small rain dampening everything but our spirits, to the large half-timbered house where on or about 23 April 1564 (St.
George
’s Day, by G.!, though the exact date is uncertain) the Master drew first breath—Mandy per usual missing nothing en route, and her mate per usual busy with the tour-guide reading and travelogue note-taking that in Her opinion distract him from seeing much of what we’re there to see, but in His preserve a range of details for our future reference, from the number of our favorite room in Canterbury Lodge to those musical numbers so beautifully rendered by organ and choir at that aforementioned Evensong. And it comes to pass that with his attention thus
divided—one eye as it were on the guidebook page describing the house immediately before them, the other on the object of that description, and his depth perception thereby at least metaphorically impaired—G. I. Newett misjudges the building’s unusually high stone entrance-step, missteps up thereonto, loses his balance, overcorrects, stumbles and slips or stumbles back and down, and then falls forward, map and guide- and logbook flying as he tries in vain to catch himself, and bangs his forehead squarely on that step-edge, incidentally scraping left palm and right elbow, and bending but not breaking his rimless eyeglass-bridge.

Exclamations of alarm from wife, from entryway tickettaker, and from tourists of sundry nationalities before and behind the faller! Who picks himself up, saying, “It’s okay; I’m okay,” while checking with Mandy to see whether in fact he is. Together they discover not only those incidental damages but—of more concern and potential consequence—that his step-banged brow is now bleeding profusely down under his bent eyeglass-frame and over his nostrils to his lips and chin (like many another oldster, G.I.N. takes a blood-thinning daily aspirin along with his vitamin/mineral supplements as a deterrent to clots and strokes, and therefore bleeds more freely from scrapes and cuts than one would otherwise). “I’m
okay
,” he tries again to reassure her, hoping and more or less believing that he is, on (recovered) balance, or anyhow will be once the forehead-gash, stanched for the nonce with a wad of pocket Kleenex, is properly cleaned and bandaged.

Nothing more than a basic first-aid kit available on the premises, its much-concerned docent informs us, but there’s “a proper chemist just a few squares off.” His assistant fetches the kit, which we make use of in the visitors’ WC while he goes back to ticket-taking and she to tour-guiding. The bleeding retarded but not altogether checked by a couple of gauze pads, and the gash itself not really sterilized, we decide to postpone for a bit our planned salute to Will’s nativity on George’s natal day and detour instead to that pharmacy, whose obliging onduty “chemist” not only sells us a supply of appropriate-sized bandages, but at no charge inspects the wound, cleans it with antiseptic swabs before re-bandaging it himself, and declares that in his judgment it requires no sutures, but offers to direct us to the nearest National Health Service facility if we want it checked out by a regular physician.

“We really ought to do that,” opines Mandy, and George sort of agrees, but really
really
doesn’t want to: The thing’s not hurting much now; the bleeding seems to be under control; his slightly bent eyeglass-frames prove readily re-bendable almost to their former alignment. Later that day, at their B&B or wherever, we’ll re-clean and re-re-bandage; meanwhile, he’d much rather get on with what we’ve come so far to see and do. Back to Henley Street and environs, okay?

“What do
you
think?” she asks the so-obliging pharmacist. He cocks head, shrugs, winks, and allows that’s about what
he’d
do in our shoes, though his missus mightn’t. He warns, however, that serious head-bangs can sometimes have delayed
consequences—intracranial hemorrhaging and the like?—and so at any sign of dizziness, headache, whatever, I should get myself promptly to a clinic.

Agreed. And more or less worrisome as is that possibility, we manage after all a most pleasant birthplace/birthday tour, returning to mid-Henley Street’s landmark Jester statue (starting place for most walking tours of the town) and thence to the Birthplace, taking care this time at that high entrance-step. Greeted familiarly by the ticket-chap, who compliments G.’s considerably tidier though already somewhat bloodstained brow-pad, we mount the also-steep staircase to the building’s first floor and tread the very floorboards once toddled by the baby Bard, then move out and on to Bridge, High, and Chapel Streets, the eight-century-old Old Town, Shakespeare’s grave, and the lovely Avon river- and canal-side walks, pausing here and there to change the bandage, eat lunch, take a piss, or merely be moved by such proximity to the man Mandy calls “King of the Queen’s English” and by the haunts of his erratic domestic life: married at age eighteen to twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway (already three months pregnant), upon whom he fathers two more children and
from
whom he then flees to make his career in London, but
to
whom he more or less returns in his prosperous early retirement and famously bequeaths his “second best bed” upon dying on his fifty-second birthday.

Which this present ’umble servant of said sweet language managed
not
to do on his after-all-well-spent seventy-seventh. Leg-weary but much satisfied with our salvaged day, at its
afternoon’s end we return to our modest lodging not far from the bridge to Bridgetown (a very different-looking venue from G.I.N.’s birthplace of the same name in Maryland’s merely 300-year-old Stratford—but then, it too has much changed over the decades since this scribbler drew first breath: from a rough-and-ready watermen’s village squeezed between the riverside crab-picking and oyster-shucking establishments and Stratford’s segregated Negro ward, to a still downscale but gradually integrating sub-community showing such signs of gentrification as a yachting marina, a passable seafood restaurant, and a row of new waterfront condominiums where the old commercial packing-houses used to be). Once again we clean, disinfect, and bandage the still raw and bruised but no longer bleeding brow, then change into warmer wear and stroll to a previously-checked-out nearby pub to raise mugs of good brown ale over shepherd’s pie and suchlike Brit vittles.

“Happy happy happy happy happy,” bids Poet/Professor Amanda Todd, and as if suddenly inspired by that pentametric salute, goes on to rhyme: “
Were your wife a bard Bardworthy instead of crappy, / She’d sing our lucky love from bed to verse, / And make from her sow’s-ear talent some silk purse.
Amen—so to squeak?”

“Hear hear!” applauds her grateful O.F.F. “And had your mate been the yarn-spinner you deserve, right-thinking readers would be dissing Stockholm for not giving
him
their effing prize. But his
real
complaint is that he has no reason to complain.” Never mind fame and fortune, he goes on to explain
to her, not for the first time: He only wishes he’d managed to perpetrate in her honor a gen-you-wine Capital-N Noteworthy Novel or two over the past half-century. “Your hubby’s a fucking failure, luv. Cheers?”

Well, now, replied ever-loyal she: Come to that, at two years past the three-quarter-century mark he remained a still
fucking
failure, anyhow, as his drying-up old rhymer of a mate could testify from that morning’s pre-breakfast frolic. To us, then, damn it, and our good luck with each other if not with our muses or the high step up into Shakespeare’s-’hood? And on with whatever’s to be the next episode of our (still-) fucking story?

Aye aye, ma’am. And even as this account of that fateful fall day has shifted from present back to past narrative tenses, so now shall our quite successful September tour. Never mind its close in big busy history-drenched London and big
too
-busy Heathrow; the long flight back to our Bush/Cheneyafflicted U. S. of A.; the jet-lagged drag of clearing customs, claiming baggage and long-parked car; the bleary-eyed twohour drive from Philly to that Stratford-Come-Lately on the Matahannock, changing G.I.N.’s brow-bandage only twice a “day” now insofar as we could reckon days. We made it, just as we’d made it through the latter half-and-then-some of the Terrible Twentieth Century into the quite possibly Terminal Twenty-First: no kids or grandkids, unlike Will and Anne (although we sometimes
pretend
to have them: more on that later, I’d guess); no recently-published prose or poetry, nor any of
our prior pubs still in print—but thus far no cancers/strokes/ Alzheimer’s/etc. either, nor (thus far) serious aftereffects of the fall. And decades of well-taught classes, well-critiqued student papers, well-colleagued colleagues, well-read books, and welltraveled trips to take satisfaction in....

And overlong catalogues like the above to be done with already, for pity’s sake! Back to our “pre-trip” routines (and bemused by the extra voltage on that adjective as we laid upon friends and colleagues our travelogue and its culmination in G.’s Henley Street trip-and-fall), we relished our new perspective on
our
Stratford,
our
Avon (County),
our
Bridgetown (whereof more to come, Muse willing-maybe-please?). Before each afternoon’s errands, chores, desk-business, and recreation, we went as usual each weekday morning to our separate workrooms in hope of inspiration, and as usual . . .

Well: As usual, September sang its song and became October. In synchrony with Delmarva’s agribusiness feedcorn harvest, the migratory geese returned in strung-out V’s from Canada and honked along our Matahannock, bringing with them brisk cool-weather fronts to relieve Tidewaterland’s drought-stressed but blessedly hurricane-free summer and remind local “snowbirds” that it was time for them to shift south to their winter HQ’s in Florida. As StratColl’s fall semester got under way, the fine maples, oaks, sweetgums, and sycamores on campus and along the town’s streets showed first signs of autumn color. Ideal weather for end-of-season yard work (if one owned a yard) and the battening of hatches for cold weather
to come; for the year’s maybe-final bicycling, or canoeing and kayaking from the college’s waterfront facility; for enjoying the long late light with sips and nibbles on porch, patio, or pool deck before November’s chilly shift back to Standard Time, and for savoring one’s own autumnality before winter comes. “Can’t last, of course,” one acknowledged over clinked wineglasses: neither good weather nor good health nor one’s happy though less-than-ideally-productive life with mate nor for that matter the nation’s already-overstrained economic prosperity and the planet’s dwindling natural resources. The “American Century” was already behind us, followed by those quagmire wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an alienated international community, a declining dollar and rising energy costs, Gilded Age excesses and inequities, climate change, economic recession—the list went on (and on and on, as G.I.N.-lists tend to do).
Meanwhile
, however?