Victor on Avon

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August 29, 2010

Victor on Avon

Walking alongside the Avon on Tuesday afternoon, I thought about how much I hadn’t written about our trip. The same can be said of walks along the river on Wednesday and Thursday.
On the way to Stratford, we managed to avoid stopping at the Edison Inn in Port Huron. And that’s, to coin a phrase, As I Like It.
That non-stop was a plus, because we enjoyed a noonday meal at Othello’s behind Stratford’s City Hall, where it doesn’t take 30 minutes for the food to come. Of course, I could have used such a wait-time at Edison’s to do some writing, but that would have been rude.
I managed to get in a light nap after lunch, leaving no time to write before that leisurely stroll along the Avon.
Tuesday evening the writers gathered at Bentley’s on the town’s main drag. I picked at a Caesar salad and sipped a bloody Mary as I pondered the play we’d be attending just a block or so away. I hadn’t really investigated “Do Not Go Gentle.” If I had, I’d have scolded myself for not having written anything before, during or after my 3 p.m. nap, because the one-character show was all about Dylan Thomas, the writer, on writing. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
In fact, it WAS Dylan Thomas, back after all these years to talk about his life of competing with Will Shakespeare. “Now there’s a writer,” Dylan said with an ever-growing hint of jealously as he consumed more whiskey as the play progress.
His stage was covered with rejected wads of paper and retrievable pages of manuscript. Several times, he picked up the retrievables with considerable care, only to toss them in the air, landing helter-skelter.
I have neither wads of paper to wad nor manuscripts to toss. My legal pad is in my backpack, far from the pen I always carry.
On Wednesday, as I dredged my last bite of deep-fried fish in a pool of malt vinegar on my plate at Molly’s Irish Pub in downtown Stratford, the thought crossed my mind: I’ve been here for 24 hours, and I haven’t written anything yet.
I had been inspired some by a morning lecture on the development and history of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” I listened like a journalist, but I took no notes. No paper, no notes.
Plagiarism was really cool back when Will was writing, using a survivor’s tale of a shipwreck in the Caribbean. And the Bard got away with it, because there was no such thing as plagiarism as we know it as journalists, students and teachers. Maybe I could write about that.
But wait a minute, didn’t Dylan Thomas say that everything possible has already been written. How can write anything without it already having been written without plagiarizing?
An idea: I could wait until I get back home and write about the meals I had and all the times I thought about writing but didn’t. Intermix the meals with performances of “Evita” and “Kiss Me Kate,” and I’d remember everything of importance and weave it into an original masterpiece of entertaining wit and wisdom.
Let’s see, what did I have for dinner on Wednesday, or breakfast and lunch on Thursday? Darn, I must have digested those meals already.
But I readily recall lobster, scallops and shrimp on Friday at Whitey’s in Davison. Yes, we drove right past the exit for Edison’s again, cutting copious amounts of time off our drive back to Greater Lansing.
To coin another phrase, I say, All’s Well That Ends Well.