Reading Shakespeare

One thing you have to remember when reading Shakespeare is that it was a different time. In Elizabethan times, the main teachings were of paranoid style of thinking. Everyone was out to get you in Elizabethan times, or so they taught everyone. So you can look for paranoia in Shakespeare or look at how he handles psychology and motivations and see how a paranoid audience would have thought about what he was saying.

Another thing, social ranking was everything. It dictated who walked into a room before whom and all the seating arrangements of a dinner party. Elizabethan people were supposed to stick up for their rank, too, but in a certain way. They also had to have self-control or decorum.

If an old man of inferior rank walked in before a young man of higher rank, the young man would say, for everyone to hear, "I'm very happy to let my aged friend in before me." Therefore letting everyone know that he understood his rank and was letting others know, while having the self-control and manners to let an older person take precedence.

This is another thing you can look for in Shakespeare and if you find a character who does not have self-control, you know that his audience would have seen that as very bad and unworthy. Hint: look for royal or high born people who lose it. The audience would have been scandalized.

I've got to read Shakespeare again myself, it's time to re-learn the Bard.

Feelings Of September

Strange, I can't remember many facts about September from when I was a child in White Rock, BC. I must have started school each year. I can remember going to school but actual September days are all fogged over.

Halloween memories are still there but for September, nothing. I can't even remember what the weather was like. Today I was thinking how I would like to be on the beach again, it's so sunny in Ottawa and the sun feels hot through the window, but was it hot enough when I was a child to go swimming? I just don't remember.

Sometimes I took  my dog down to the beach. Cindy loved to swim and fetch sticks that I would throw out into the ocean. So dogs could swim.

There's no way to swim outside in Ottawa in September.

It's like this start-of-school year month is a gear-up for everything else that goes on the rest of the year. Halloween, Remembrance Day and Christmas/New Years to name a few.
I find this month slow and at times, boring. The other night I had so little to do, I was trying to recall the Brady Bunch lyrics. You  have to be pretty bored to think up that.

If Mom were still alive, she'd say, "why don't you write?" But I'd already written.

The one thing that's still with me about September from my childhood, is that it feels new. It feels like a beginning. Like something possibly wonderful is going to happen at any moment.

I guess then the only thing I recall from Septembers of my childhood are the feelings about it. Which is nice enough.

My e-book, The Mountain City Bronzes is still available at the MuseItUp Bookstore

http://museituppublishing.com/bookstore/index.php/now-available-in-ebook/the-mountain-city-bronzes-detail

Manning Park and Other Places

I always loved camping so I'm sorry now that my knee won't let me hike through the woods anymore. As a child my family loved to go to Manning Park to the east of Hope. The only sad part of driving to this park is that you have to drive over the Hope slide. I couldn't pass over that place without wondering about all the people under me.

What were they thinking in those few minutes when they were suffocating to death after the mountainside came down on them? It is still a haunting thought to me.

I loved Manning Park because of the various points of interest it had. One was the stone bowls. Made by the action of water, these rocks were hollowed out from the inside, making what seemed like bowls on their sides. One would think they would make perfect houses for hobbits, if such a creature existed.

The mountains of BC are great of course, and we spent our share of time in Manning Part climbing up hills, the smaller mountains. I never did ever climb a real mountain. I'm too afraid.

As a child, I always wanted to be the type of person who could do anything, but no, that's not me.

Another place I liked was Barkerville in BC. This is a tourist town but there is camping there, although I think there is a hotel, too. We bought real rock candy for a penny and saw a music hall show with the performers dressed as they would have been in the 1880s.

I later learned that my brother hated Barkerville. I didn't know this, we spent time in the town's cemetery and I thought he was enjoying himself.

The best thing that happened was when it rained so hard that a little bird flew under our awning of our tent to protect itself. Mother said that we should be quiet and no one make a move to touch it, that would be cruel. So we all waited for the rain to end and then the bird flew off.

That was the good part of those heavy canvas tents. They were good protection, even if they did weigh about twenty pounds.

So I'll have to live with my memories unless I can ever afford to go to Algonquin Park's Arowhon hotel. It costs about $1200.00 a week, not too bad for what you get, and that's all meals free and full use of all activities, canoes etc. It's something to look forward to.

Weather Fashion

So it's hot. Real hot. I've been outside twice today and came back with sweat dripping down my face. I don't like the heat, it's so uncomfortable and I like the cold or cool weather.

I have a lot of reasons. One being, that I can wear nice clothes. In sweltering summer, if I wear nice clothes, they get ruined by sweat. In fall and spring, those clothes are warm and don't need to be washed as much.

Besides, at my age, I'm finding that I suffer in the heat. I've been to the emergency ward three times due to heat problems. I guess my old brain is cooked enough.

My other season that I find hard is the winter. Mostly because of the ice on the pavement. The cold isn't too bad but like summer, why bother wearing nice clothes when they're covered up with a heavy coat.

I'm waiting for an inventor to come up with clothes that will keep someone warm and be as thin as regular clothes. That will happen someday, like flying cars, but I don't know if I will be alive.

I would really like to wear nice stylish clothes all year round but for now I'll have to just use fall and spring for my fashion outlet.

Madeleine

Madeleine. I hated my name as a child. That is the fault of school yard bullies who would look at me and say "What kind of name is that?" Just because Madeleine is a French name and I grew up in a very English place. It made me feel like a freak.

On the other hand. I always liked it when someone else was named Madeleine. Like the book Madeleine. We read that in grade two and I felt the teacher was reading it just to me. Then there was Madeleine L'Engels. Madeleine Kahn. Remember her?

They made me feel I wasn't alone in the world. Of course when I moved out to Eastern Canada, I couldn't have picked a better place than Ottawa. Madeleines abound out here, so close to Quebec. I even have found a cousin named Madeleine McLaughlin.

I was so excited to be close to people who didn't think Madeleine was a freak name that I even suggested to other Madeleines that we form a group. So silly. These women didn't need a group.

But all these experiences have taught me how narrow and mean those kids were back then. Re-thinking it, I realize it wasn't everyone that picked on me, just a few.

Just one more Madeleine. Madeleine McCann. I urge everyone to say a prayer for this little girl to bring her home to her parents. I'll put up a link you can go to for her.
http://www.findmadeleine.com/home.html

Now I like my name. I'm not a freak for being named Madeleine. I've learned everyone's name is beautiful. We're all beautiful. Except bullies.

Otzi The Iceman

I find history fascinating not just for what it does tell me but for what it doesn't. Take Otzi, the world's oldest 'cold case'. We know Otzi was murdered. In our terms, it makes him an 'innocent' victim, nobody deserves to be murdered, right?

I would argue that we don't know anything about the time he lived in. Maybe he was a hellraiser and their way of dealing with that was to kill. Maybe. This was way before the Jews came up with 'Thou shalt not kill'.

I'm just saying that we have no way to know whether Otzi was a good man or bad man, or whether those Judeo-Christian terms meant anything at all to the people who lived back then. Maybe Otzi was a magician and they feared him. Is that why they waited until they got him alone?

And speaking of alone, when does a man travel alone through this kind of terrain? Not trade, I would suppose because they'd have animals to carry their goods. Was he cast out? In a lot of tribes, the only people who are alone are those whom the tribe have disowned because they're bad.

On the other hand, Otzi was well dressed which might mean that he had some 'riches' of whatever that may have meant back then.

I know these are a lot of questions, but I think most authors ask questions like these, probably about everyone they think of. People on a plane when it flies over etc.

But for Otzi, it just makes him more fascinating as it makes the times he lived in more interesting. Will we ever know exactly what kind of society he came from, the rules and mores of the group? Probably not.

It's a great thing to think about and some author, somewhere, will surely write a fiction book about his life.

Old Friends

One thing I think about more often than not is old friends. Where are they? What happened with their lives?

On the face of it, it would seem simple: Use Facebook to find them. Well, that doesn't work with my friends. One was a Jehovah's Witness, she definitely won't be using Facebook. Anyway, I know she married and don't know her married name.

The other one was a good friend for years. Since grade seven. Her ethnic background was Ukrainian, her last name difficult to spell. Until you got used to it. We did all kinds of things together.

I'm sure I won't find her again. Mostly because her philosophy was, "Never look back." So she probably has put me out of her mind totally by now.

I guess my point is that it's not always easy to look back, even when you have all the tools (computer) to do it efficiently. And since all my friends were girls, there's the chance of marriage and name change as mentioned above.

So I guess I'll just have to keep them as memories, there was one more, a girl I knew in elementary school. Good memories and maybe I will see them again some day. If I ever go back to BC - a big maybe.

But forgive me if once in a while I go looking for them online just on the off chance that they're there.