by David L. Johns
I have a friend called Bill and I drive to his town to visit him as often as I can. He’s at least twenty years older than I am. Although we never talk about our age difference, it might be among the first things you notice when you see us together in a restaurant.
Bill retired last summer after teaching literature in the university for over forty years. I’ve been teaching for about fifteen years, which means I’m only a third of the professor Bill is.
He’s living an active retirement, playing double Bridge, taking piano lessons, and visiting his family who live on both coasts. He traveled to Austria last year on a Mozart tour. I’m envious. But I had to work, so I couldn’t go with him.
Bill regularly attends theatre productions in Stratford, Ontario, in Chicago, and at the Globe in England. He’s still writing theatre reviews and offering arts commentary on a N
PR affiliate.
So, no matter what people think when they see us chatting over lunch, I’m glad to be with him.
We talk about many things, but always the subject turns to Shakespeare. And, since we talk about Shakespeare, of course, we talk about everything worth talking about—life, love, sorrow, betrayal, desire, ambition. Last summer we attended a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. I sat next to Bill, which meant I had the best seat in the house.
“I just saw the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre’s production of King Lear,” I told him. “The staging was striking and brilliant, in a minimalist way,” I said, trying hard to sound like one of his reviews. He smiled at my effort. “I cried when Lear realized it was his daughter Cordelia who loved him truly.”
Bill has seen more stage productions of this one play than Liz Taylor has had husbands, so he can draw comparisons I can’t.
“It left me a little cold,” he said. “But, every Lear has to live up to my first.” This was my first Lear.
Bill taught Shakespeare for years, he’s acted in the Bard’s plays, he’s even contributed to the prestigious, Shakespeare Quarterly and the Riverside Shakespeare. He knows his stuff. But this isn’t shop-talk; this is Shakespeare in the skin and deep in the belly—not “will-this-be-on-the-exam?” It’s wisdom from someone nearly four hundred years dead passed along to two real men eating quiche in a restaurant, one a senior, the other middle aged.
That’s the way it is with great literature—it fires the imagination. It makes friends out of strangers by showing that there is more uniting humanity over the ages than some care to admit.
Which brings me back to Bill and me eating lunch talking about our friend Will.
Have fun, be safe, and send me a postcard.
David
A blog about Being Somewhere
I'm on My Space...and I'm here too: being_somewhere@yahoo.com
Copyright 2007 by David L. Johns