Skip to main content

Shakespeare at the Library

Emily asked me to take her to the library to get some of Shakespeare's works today. I keep telling her it's not normal to like poetry or Shakespeare, but what can I do? The girl is just weird that way. If she were in public school, she'd probably get the crap kicked out of her every day if she weren't so pretty.

Anyway, I wasn't sure if Shakespeare was kept on some special shelf reserved for nerds or if it would be in regular fiction, so Emily and I headed straight to the information desk and asked one of the volunteers.

"Um.....Shakespeare?" she asked me looking around the library as if hoping to spot it. "How do you spell that?" she finally asked as she decided to type it in on the computer.

I spelled it for her and she said, "Shakespeare.......that's like, who wrote it, right?"

Emily and I froze with pleasant expressions on our faces. I knew if we made eye contact with each other we would burst out laughing. "Yes," I replied, managing to keep my face straight. "That's who wrote it."

"Well, I don't see anything by him in fiction," she told me. "Maybe there's some in non-fiction?"

"I don't think he wrote any non-fiction," I told her. She eventually told us to wander around the fiction area and look under 'S'. We tried that for a bit and then eventually asked someone else who was able to direct us to the shelf in the Young Adult section where Shakespeare resides. Because teens love Shakespeare, you know.

To mine and Emily's credit, neither of us said a word about the library volunteer while we were still at the library. Neither of us even looked at each other the entire time we were there. But once we got out to the car, we finally made eye contact.

And we laughed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mammogram

I'm having my annual mammogram today. I always hear about how painful they are, but honestly, I've never thought they are that bad. Not the most comfortable, but not painful either. Every time I have a mammogram, I'm reminded of this story. It won the Erma Bombeck Writing Competition and I still get a kick out of it every time I read it. So I'm posting it here today for your reading pleasure: Erma Bombeck Writing Competition 1st place in Humor Category Winner Leigh Anne Jasheway of Eugene, Oregon "The First Time's Always the Worst" The first mammogram is the worst. Especially when the machine catches on fire. That's what happened to me. The technician, Gail, positioned me exactly as she wanted me (think a really complicated game of Twister - right hand on the blue, left shoulder on the yellow, right breast as far away as humanly possible from the rest of your body). Then she clamped the machine down so tight, I think my breast actually turned inside o...
1 comment
Read more

Luau, Luau

This week we attended our first luau! We went to the luau at the Hale Koa hotel. The grounds were just incredible. There were men playing soft Hawaiian music, the plants and flowers were glorious. There were people in native costumes making headbands out of palm fronds, chopping up fresh coconut for us to taste, handing out flowers for us to put behind our ears and handing out seashell leis to each guest. It was very relaxed and peaceful. This was a Samoan man who kept us entertained during the cocktail hour. He was very funny! Check out those tattoos. He said the tattoos were part of a rite of passage that he had to go through. He said it took fourteen days to complete the tattoo and, yes, it hurt. And yes, everything was tattooed. He demonstrated how to climb a coconut tree using only a bandanna around his feet. They picked people out of the audience and gave them a quick hula lesson. Katie was thrilled to be one of the people chosen and of course it irritated Ben because he thi...
7 comments
Read more

Japanese Fishing Shrine

Here's an interesting little spot we stopped to see. I'd passed this many times before and had never stopped to see what it was. Since GG and Sherry were here, we decided to check it out. There is a shrine of some sort with a statue and a carved rock. There was no information on sight as to what it is that I could find. There were flowers, food and incense left around the base of the shrine. There was a ceramic statue and a rock with a figure carved into it. None of the food was old or rotting (although plenty of it had clearly been pecked by birds) and the flowers were all fresh which made me think it must be cleaned and cared for on a regular basis. After we got home, I did some research and found this article about it from the Hawaii Star Bulletin, our local newspaper (I have edited out some bits, but otherwise the article is unchanged): "Maintenance" of the monument has been assumed by a group of Vietnamese Buddhists - Shingon Shu Hawaii, the Buddhist temple th...
2 comments
Read more