| I am the oldest of eight kids in an Irish Catholic family raised on Cape Cod. My Dad had his own real estate agency -- and it was more or less him on his own. He was proud to be a Navy vet -- a gunners mate who was there at D-Day Normandy and D-Day Okinawa on an LST. And it was from him I first learned to appreciate the great English poets. It was a lot of work raising that many kids and every couple of weeks he would unwind by listening to some Clancy Brothers Irish phonograph records and work on a bottle of Seagram's Seven. I suppose if he tried, he could have been an alcoholic, but with eight kids he was probably too scared to become one. Besides, it was a kind of generational thing. Getting a bit drunk is what you did back then -- before the internet and FR. LOL. Ironically it was at these tipsy times when he would sometimes sit me down in a darkened living room late at night and talk about life. And he would often start spouting a few lines from some favorite poems. This was not Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, or any light melancholy stuff. No, his liking was the epic poets and the subject was always the heavy stuff about honor, suffering, and strife. Poems like Gunga Din, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Charge of the Light Brigade, and Invictus -- with a few Shakespeare soliloquies mixed in. My Dad never really knew more than a few lines in each poem, but he had talent and was the best actor in his high school class of 100. So he spent a little time teaching me how to recite some of the lines with great feeling and with the right tempo and emphasis. And then when I was 10 years old, everyone was so excited because JFK was just elected President and his family vacation home was in Hyannisport maybe only 5 miles away across Lewis Bay. So my Dad bought a vinyl record with Kennedy speeches in it including his famous Inaugural Address. And for some odd reason, I listened to it a few times and decided to memorize it. Then I made the dumb mistake of reciting it to my Dad, who loved it and then decided to use me as his prop. Whenever his friends or my aunts would come over, my Dad would force me to recite the speech and I'd get all embarrassed, but the pressure was too much to resist. And it worked out fine and I would get a little applause and some encouragement, so maybe it did me some good. One last tidbit: we rented part of the house as a summer apartment. And one time during JFK's term we actually rented to a family where the father was a Secret Service agent for the Kennedys. Well you just knew my Dad would force me recite the Kennedy speech to that guy. But sure enough, a few weeks later the guy mailed a beautiful poster of the Kennedy Address along with a typed and signed letter from the First Lady saying how she heard about my speech and thanked me. Well my Dad was so proud -- had the poster framed with the letter inside. Don't know what actually happened to that poster, but I suppose it would be considered something valuable today. So that's a round about way of telling you how I learned about Tennyson! Hope I didn't bore you, VK, with my little story. Maybe one of the nice things about being anonymous is we can discuss things we wouldn't normally talk about with strangers. |
