I will say so.

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And he does say so.
And more.
We can count these last sentences he will utter on our hands. Perhaps even one hand, depending on the editor. If we collected them in a basket, would these be the words he’d want to be his last?

He spends his last moments on earth going between a mother and son. His last speech is to offer instructive advice to said mother.

Is this how he’d want to go out?

I’m not sure, if I knew my minutes on this planet were numbered, that I’d spend them trying to fix anyone else’s mess. I’d hope to finish off with something pithy or meaningful or true.

I wouldn’t care if it were clichéd; I’d be up for telling every last person and thing that I loved them. Polonius has some rhetorical arts. I’m sure he’d have preferred to go out on a philosophical speech.

But, I suppose, we never do get what we want.

He gets, at least, a nice dramatic death – a sword through the guts is so much better than a wasting away.

I will come by and by.

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As soon as I am explicitly summoned, I start to drag my heels. When someone calls me and demands I call them right away, I do not. In fact, I call them even later than I might have had they not demanded an immediate response. If I call them at all.

If someone says, “I need you down here right away!” My first thought is, “Oh yeah?” And then, slowly, if I feel like it – I’ll give a response like Hamlet’s here.

I don’t take orders well.

They fool me to the top of my bent.

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The things I have tolerated from good performers!
And almost always the male ones.
“I need them!” I think.
“He said he’ll show up.”
“He said he’d be there.”
“I know he’s an asshole but he’s so talented!”
“I had a feeling about him but I think it’s going to be fine.”

It almost never is.

The stacks of headshots we’d get in the mail would break our hearts.
The pile of women would be measured in feet.
The pile of men – in inches.

Men with credentials that would get them tossed to the side if they were women were called and auditioned.
And some of them, we cast.
And some of them were great.
But some of them were not.
And I let them fool me
Because I was desperate.
And then they made me crazy.

 

Then I will come to my mother by and by.

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The journey of a life feels like a kind of coming and going. At first, there is only the coming to mother – because there is only mother. There is no self.

Then you pull away, to start to understand you are someone different.

It is a rubberband independence wherein you walk away only so far before you spring back again.

As we age, it’s not that we lose the rubberband – it’s just that it gets longer and longer. We can wander farther.
Or for so long it may seem as if there were no rubberband at all.
But you will return. In one way or another.

Very like a whale.

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I read a lot of Ogden Nash as a young person. I don’t think I’ve thought of Ogden Nash since.

There’s not really the market for his kind of work anymore, is there?

His or Dorothy Parker’s?

You don’t really have the Comedy Poem genre anymore.

There must be, of course, many funny poems. (Poets! Link ‘em up here!) But the only place funny poems might reliably show up anymore is in children’s books.

I feel like I want to go pick up some Ogden Nash just as a mark of respect for all the poems I read all those years ago. It’d be fun to read them with my grown-up eyes

Or like a whale.

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I saw an article on the internet about a sign on a gym entrance that asked, “Do you want to be a whale or a mermaid?” Presumably this is designed to be motivation to lose weight but someone posted a response.

The centerpiece of it was how awesome whales are and how mermaids don’t exist.

Our whole lives we’ve been led to believe that being called a whale is an insult – which is not only insulting to us, but also to whales.

After reading that little rant, I will, from henceforth, take being like a whale as a compliment.

They are intelligent, gentle, kind and social creatures. And they sing beautifully, too.

It is backed like a weasel.

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The curves of the spine of an animal
Reveals, at times,
its identity
its essence.

So, too, the curves of a human’s spine
Whisper secrets about the spirit
About the way that person moves through the world.

I meet so many people who push their way – right through the small of the back, curving it more and more

And there are people who are pulled through their lives by their heads

Those that are just barely catching up with themselves
Those who are pushed down.

The landscape of the spine
Backing each person
As their own special hillside view.

Methinks it is like a weasel.

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I have very little sense of what an actual weasel is. It’s an animal that gets much more play as a metaphor than as an actual animal.

Is it like a ferret a little bit?

Or is ferret another name for a weasel- weasels having developed such a bad name.

How did weasels become weasels? Are weasels particularly weasely? Are they sneaky and duplicitous? What did they do to deserve such an unsavory reputation?

By th’ mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed.

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This is so much like a conversation with a child. There is the imaginative element – the (possibly) fictitious cloud in its (possibly) fictitious shape. There is the yes, and-ing, the acceptance of the fanciful proposition. “By the mass!” “Wow, you’re right! My goodness!”

If the conversation were with a child, it might be sweet.

Instead, there’s a level of menace to the playing. A demonstration of manipulative skills. It always feels to me like a little bit of a show for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Like – “You think you can manipulate me? Watch me work.”

Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about camels. I’m writing a book in which a camel plays a significant part. I have a sense of what a camel is like because I’ve seen photographs and video. I have seen camels on screens, if not in person. I’ve put together a camel in my mind from books, TV shows, movies and cartoons.

But where did Shakespeare get his sense of camel?
From books?
Paintings?
There weren’t camels in England.
Or Denmark for that matter.

I suspect that camels got a lot of the attention they got mostly from the Bible. They show up there. . .so camels take up some space in people’s imaginations – despite never having seen one.

The shape of a camel likely became quite significant to those who went to church.
It makes a real animal somewhat mythic, I would think.

The shape of a camel always seen as a painting or stained glass or illumination or drawing. A unicorn might be as real in this scenario.