Read Online How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed - Free Book Online
Authors: Mameve Medwed
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loveliest drawing, wrote the loveliest poem… she’d begin. But to my father, my messy scribbles, my awkward rhymes, showed only that his ivied ivory tower harbored no Mary Cassatt, no Emily Dickinson.
No Elizabeth Barrett Browning either. At least in the poetry sense. Still, I once wrote several stanzas to my dog Jinx that, thanks to a rhyming dictionary, compared him to both a minx and a sphinx. This effort won an honorary-mention volume (paperback) of the collected E. E. Cummings. (The judge was a former student, my father felt obliged to enlighten me.) In fact, now that I think of it, Elizabeth and I turn out to have a lot in common. We’ve got not only our canine poetry but also our domineering-father issues; such a bond would unite us even without the passed-down chamber pot. Neither Barretts nor Randolphs dared to dispute the great man in their midst. My mother had to flee to Henrietta, to the other side of Harvard Square and then the oceans beyond, to escape my father. Elizabeth fled to Robert and to Italy to escape hers. Even in his final illness, Mr. Barrett returned all her letters unopened and refused to let his daughter cross the threshold of his door.
But perhaps my father was only trying to toughen me up for the world beyond my own threshold. Maybe dealing with the bully inside your door was how he prepared me for doing battle with the bully next door.
These days, my father isn’t that bad. Kiki has mellowed him. Could it be the couples counseling she’s talked him into? Who would have thought? But then who would have pictured him wearing a grass skirt and strumming the ukulele, as documented in the shocking photographic evidence from their Hawaiian honeymoon? On our Sunday telephone conversations between Cambridge and La Jolla, I can sense a bit of regret for old child-rearing ways now that he’s seen the shock of the new. That’s very perceptive of you, Abigail, he’ll say to me when I make some prosaic observation like the reason Atticus is so slow tying his shoes is that kids all have Velcro now.
I may be perceptive, but my emotional intelligence as far as Ned and Lavinia were—and are—concerned plunged straight to the bottom of Stanford Binet’s percentile pit.
Which offers a good reason to get through our mutual childhoods fast. I know you can go to the theater and see the abridged Shakespeare, all the comedies and tragedies acted out and boiled down into an hour including a ten-minute bathroom/Raisinets break.
Let’s start with my corner of the world. Cambridge may be a city of 100,000, a city of diverse neighborhoods, a community—or several communities—proud of its multiculturalism. Our ethnic restaurants paste their high Zagat ratings and maps of Afghanistan, the Algarve, Ethiopia, Turkey on their windows and doors; our bookstores (not that I go into them) are Marxist, feminist, Buddhist, gay, architectural, revolutionary, culinary, foreign language; the kiosk in Harvard Square sells the Sewanee Review next to Hustler and Pent house, Daedalus, Seventeen, Hello!, and Italian Vogue . Some Cantabrigians boycott the bridges to Boston, insisting that Cambridge alone can satisfy a person’s every need.
You know Linnaeus’s system of classification: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Well, we were children of academics, a Cambridge subspecies but a kingdom unto ourselves. You wouldn’t believe my childhood playmates; their parents and grandparents bore the titles of Nobel laureates, Bancroft, Pritzker, and Pulitzer Prize holders, MacArthur geniuses by the score. They advised governments, served as secretaries of state, headed the National Endowment for the Arts, donned the robes of Supreme Court justices. I guess I shouldn’t name names without permission, and many of my old playmates, who fled Cambridge as soon as they came of age, would be a challenge to hunt down. They’ve joined twelve-step programs, are living in cabins in the woods, and are up to page 1200
No Elizabeth Barrett Browning either. At least in the poetry sense. Still, I once wrote several stanzas to my dog Jinx that, thanks to a rhyming dictionary, compared him to both a minx and a sphinx. This effort won an honorary-mention volume (paperback) of the collected E. E. Cummings. (The judge was a former student, my father felt obliged to enlighten me.) In fact, now that I think of it, Elizabeth and I turn out to have a lot in common. We’ve got not only our canine poetry but also our domineering-father issues; such a bond would unite us even without the passed-down chamber pot. Neither Barretts nor Randolphs dared to dispute the great man in their midst. My mother had to flee to Henrietta, to the other side of Harvard Square and then the oceans beyond, to escape my father. Elizabeth fled to Robert and to Italy to escape hers. Even in his final illness, Mr. Barrett returned all her letters unopened and refused to let his daughter cross the threshold of his door.
But perhaps my father was only trying to toughen me up for the world beyond my own threshold. Maybe dealing with the bully inside your door was how he prepared me for doing battle with the bully next door.
These days, my father isn’t that bad. Kiki has mellowed him. Could it be the couples counseling she’s talked him into? Who would have thought? But then who would have pictured him wearing a grass skirt and strumming the ukulele, as documented in the shocking photographic evidence from their Hawaiian honeymoon? On our Sunday telephone conversations between Cambridge and La Jolla, I can sense a bit of regret for old child-rearing ways now that he’s seen the shock of the new. That’s very perceptive of you, Abigail, he’ll say to me when I make some prosaic observation like the reason Atticus is so slow tying his shoes is that kids all have Velcro now.
I may be perceptive, but my emotional intelligence as far as Ned and Lavinia were—and are—concerned plunged straight to the bottom of Stanford Binet’s percentile pit.
Which offers a good reason to get through our mutual childhoods fast. I know you can go to the theater and see the abridged Shakespeare, all the comedies and tragedies acted out and boiled down into an hour including a ten-minute bathroom/Raisinets break.
Let’s start with my corner of the world. Cambridge may be a city of 100,000, a city of diverse neighborhoods, a community—or several communities—proud of its multiculturalism. Our ethnic restaurants paste their high Zagat ratings and maps of Afghanistan, the Algarve, Ethiopia, Turkey on their windows and doors; our bookstores (not that I go into them) are Marxist, feminist, Buddhist, gay, architectural, revolutionary, culinary, foreign language; the kiosk in Harvard Square sells the Sewanee Review next to Hustler and Pent house, Daedalus, Seventeen, Hello!, and Italian Vogue . Some Cantabrigians boycott the bridges to Boston, insisting that Cambridge alone can satisfy a person’s every need.
You know Linnaeus’s system of classification: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Well, we were children of academics, a Cambridge subspecies but a kingdom unto ourselves. You wouldn’t believe my childhood playmates; their parents and grandparents bore the titles of Nobel laureates, Bancroft, Pritzker, and Pulitzer Prize holders, MacArthur geniuses by the score. They advised governments, served as secretaries of state, headed the National Endowment for the Arts, donned the robes of Supreme Court justices. I guess I shouldn’t name names without permission, and many of my old playmates, who fled Cambridge as soon as they came of age, would be a challenge to hunt down. They’ve joined twelve-step programs, are living in cabins in the woods, and are up to page 1200
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