Of Beasts and Bards

Forward: The following literate, humorous, smart, and very touching blog post was penned by a good friend and amazing author. Due to contractual obligations, I accept all consequences for posting this on my blog (unless said-consequences lead to a proposal of marital and monetary proportions, in which case, I am to give Mr. Tebow her phone number). Also, let it be known that I, Kaitlin Ann Hardy, have proof-read this post and give it my FULL stamp of approval. I, Kaitlin Ann Hardy, am the very definition of a "reasonable person," that is, if you would define a "reasonable person" being someone who emails Tom Hanks every day while sitting in bed, eating Krispy Kreme donuts and listening to Nellie McKay. Which I do.

That being said, this post is unusually intelligent and classy for the likes of this blog. You must understand that I surround myself with people who are smarter than me in the event that I can't read the restraining order from Tom Hanks and Company.

Words is hard.

Finally, my guest blogger, who is one of the sweetest and most humble people I know, does not easily accept accolades (even well-disguised ones), so please leave her many in the comments section because then she can't wave them off in her typically nonchalant and embarrassed fashion. (Insert Kaitlin's evil laugh here...)

Without further ado, I am pleased to introduce Heavenly Hats' first guest blogger: Miss Katie Yinger (AKA Ying-Factor) (Cue applause...)
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“Let me not the marriage of true minds admit impediment.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”

I have to hand it to Shakespeare. Despite the fact that this same poem was quoted by Marianne’s beloved Willoughby, who turned out to be a total player in Sense and Sensibility, and despite the fact that Shakespeare could quite possibly have written this for a man, this poem somehow managed to remain comfortably entrenched amongst my Top Ten favorite works of all time, ranking within striking distance of Pride and Prejudice and To Kill a Mockingbird and just slightly above Pink, Pink Go to the Sink.

I can hardly think of barks without getting all dreamy-eyed and picturing a white picket fence surrounding five or six miniature Katies happily playing with me and some combination of Mr. Darcy (less the sideburns), Edward Cullen (less the paleness and fangs), and whoever played Spartacus in that old movie (less the weird chin).

Unless I’m thinking of tree barks. Then I just think about those leaf notebooks we had to make in fourth grade and the bird that pooped on my head while I was collecting said leaves at Vanderbilt. But I digress.

This poem, when it talks about love’s “not being time’s fool” and “altering not with his brief hours and weeks” but “bearing it out e’en to the edge of doom” seems to be about life after the happily-ever-after. Shakespeare ends the poem with a couplet, which I will define for all my poetically illiterate (aka, non-flaky) readers as “a two-line rhyming thingy at the end of a poem.”

“If this be false and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

And Shakespeare definitely writ. This ability to turn daily tasks and phrases into seventeenth-century innuendos, as well as possessing a gift for plot invention that most modern-day soap opera writers would use a “happy dagger” on themselves to get, certainly earns Shakespeare a place of honor among the greatest bards of all time. Macbeth kills his dad and marries his mom while witches prick their thumbs and cackle in perfect poetry around their cauldrons. Honestly, who else can come up with stuff that good? Shakespeare meant business when he penned this poem. He was talented, and he was a man, so by the transitive theory of mathematics, we can deduce that he was at least moderately arrogant. (He would never have staked his innuendos and his Days-of-Our-Lives-esque plot structure on a few lines about barks and sickles if he didn’t really believe them...)

So this poem is basically about what happens after the “rosy lips and cheeks” start sagging under the weight of “Time’s bending sickle.” In short, it’s a poem about real life. Real romance. It’s not some story about Cinderella or Belle where the major characters catch love like a disease and end up married to a total stranger.

I watched Beauty and the Beast last night. Belle was my favorite Disney princess growing up. We were “kindred spirits," so to speak. She had brown hair. She liked to read. She wore a yellow dress. And she was generally acknowledged to be weird. All I needed was to find me a beast who looked decent in a blue suit and owned a castle of talking furniture and household items, and I would have had it made. But when I watched it the other night, I realized something:

Belle was an absolute moron.

Really, Belle? He warded a few wolves off you after he exploded at you in rage. He eventually made an effort to eat with a spoon. And, he released you in the end, even though the enchanted flower was about to die and force him to remain a monster forever. You’re right, Belle; he’s a winner. Definitely better than all those other guys who wouldn’t have thrown you in prison to begin with. (Although if it were me, I’d go hunt down that sorceress and demand that she give Mr. Beast better hair and eyebrows in his human form.) At any rate, the movie ends with Belle and Beast dancing together, while the recently-humanized servants joyfully look on. I presume they all lived "happily ever after."

Or take Cinderella. In the animated version, the prince utters no more than ten words throughout the entire movie. Then, they’re kissing in his garden, and she has to leave suddenly. Apparently, their hours-long conversation together doesn't seem to acquaint Mr. Charming with the answers to those difficult and probing questions of “What is your last name?” and “Where do you live?” But not to worry. The slipper eventually fits, and they, too, live "happily ever after."

What of this “happily ever after," though? Most romances promise that if you meet that one beast or really good kisser who also just happens to be a prince, then the rest of your life is blue skies and Sonic strawberry slushes. But the truth of the matter is that I haven’t met a single talking beast yet. Not one. And I’m 23 (which is less than a decade removed from a single woman’s “over-the-hill,” panic age). My age equates roughly to the mid-forties for a married person. In short, I’ve been around a while. I know stuff. So you can trust me. There is, at best, a minuscule supply of talking beasts in the world, and if you do happen to find one, I’d be quite shocked if he could manage to pull off wearing a blue suit.

Sometimes, I think we settle for attempting to mirror our lives off of fairy-tales. We start believing that a pretty girl and a mute prince (that only met five hours ago) have a real shot at eternal, matrimonial bliss. It’s almost an afterthought: they get married, and oh, yeah, um, what then? Well, er, they, um, they…well, the rest of their life together is great. Perfect. In fact, it’s so good that I’ll just let you make up whatever it is that you think the perfect "rest-of-their-lives" would look like. Yeah, that’s it. They are really happy, in whatever really happy way you imagine them to be. They live "happily ever after."

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still absolutely love fairy-tales. For fictional reading and movie-watching, fairy-tales are about as perfect as you can get. But the sad thing is, that in real life, the fairy-tales have it backwards. It’s the stuff that happens after the happily-ever-after ending that is the stuff worth telling. The story hasn’t really even begun until after "the after.

It’s that old man I saw, still wearing his wedding band, pushing around his invalid wife at a wedding last night.

It’s the old man my friend knew who would sit for hours on end at his wife’s nursing home, every day, just brushing her hair.

It’s that single mother, watching proudly as her son, whom she has loved and supported throughout his entire life, graduates from a drug detox program, knowing that he’s the one out of two hundred who lived through it.

It’s the stuff that’s been tried again and again and remained true after the “happily-ever-after” that’s the most beautiful. And it’s also genuine. It’s attainable. We see examples of it every day. Why settle for a fairy-tale when the attainable reality is so much stronger and more beautiful? Shakespeare had it right. Love is an ever-fixed mark that is never shaken.

It is eternal. It is powerful. It is beautiful.

And it is real.