In Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” we are asked to picture a magical island on which we find a man named Prospero, who lives there with his daughter, Miranda. He has a servant named Caliban, a wild sort of partially human creature who believes the island should really belong to him, so he spends a good deal of his time creating problems for Prospero.
Dear Blogger-type friends: It looks like the question this week is a bit
too difficult. Sorry.
We had a nice response for Robert Frost last week; few
correct answers this week. I’ll shift
gears and come up with something more manageable for next Sunday. Hope to see you then. --Berowne
(Also for Three Word Wednesday and ABC Wednesday: "L" is for "Lem")
Here’s
this week’s Berownial quiz question:
Some people get everything handed to them.
There I was, working at the same crummy job for the
past twelve years and getting essentially nowhere, when I learned that my old
army buddy Earl had a relative who suddenly up and died.
If that sounds like a tragedy, it wasn’t much of one
for Earl; the deceased was an uncle he really didn’t know very well. However, due to the intricacies of inheritance
law it seems that Earl was next of kin and he learned that he now had a house,
along with a cash inheritance.
What a break that was! After his wife left, he found he was a single
parent trying to raise a sixteen-year old daughter, Milly, in what I believe
are referred to as straitened financial circumstances – i e, not much in the
way of actual dough.
He couldn't conceal a shock when Earl saw what he had
inherited. It wasn’t just a house; to a
guy who had been living in a small apartment it was a mansion. Three
bathrooms, he kept saying to himself.
And each of the numerous rooms in the place seemed as big as his former
apartment. It wasn’t a just a break; it
was a red-hot miracle.
To top it all off, it came with help. There was a hired man named Lem who had been
with his uncle for years, and in his will the old man had specified that
whoever inherits his house should keep Lem on; this would be a plus because he
knew the place so well.
Well, Earl thought that was fine. He proposed to have the gardener/handyman do the necessary
work while he concentrated on learning about fine wines and how to live like an
alleged upper-class gentleman.
But there was a fly in the Pouilly-Fuisse. Lem turned out to be difficult. Oh, he’d do the work, but only with an
avalanche of grumbling and by making it clear that whatever there was to be
done could wait till tomorrow, or maybe like next week. He showed little respect for Earl, though he
was, of course, his boss.
From time to time Lem claimed that the old man had
told him he would be inheriting the
place - it was supposed to be his. Earl
just put up with this, thinking it’s the sort of thing people have to get used
to once they’ve inherited a mansion.
But then things got even uglier with Lem – who was
already ugly to begin with. He had had his eye
on Milly, the daughter of the house, for some time. She reported to her father that he had made
some “suggestions” to her, not all of which she had understood but was pretty
sure they were unpleasant.
That tore it. Lem had to go.
When I heard Earl’s story, I couldn’t help thinking
it reminded me of one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays.
Which play?
(Also
submitted to Sunday Scribblings.)
