Sorry for the lack of posting the last four days. First I was giving thanks, and then I was suffering what feels like Cold #1,386 this year. In fact, I am still suffering from it so who knows how much sense this post will make?
Today I will recount one of the most bitter experiences of my life. When I was in middle school, the Magna Carta went on some kind of whirlwind tour, complete with a tour bus that said "MAGNA CARTA" in ginormous dayglo letters, as if the Magna Carta were a rock star or something. It stopped in our town, and every single pupil in public school was forced to wait in a seemingly endless line to enter the brightly-colored tour bus and gaze upon the document upon which our own Constitution is supposedly modeled. I was hugely excited to be seeing this piece of history, and something written in 1215 seemed inconceivably old to me in those days. (Now that I have seen the actual Dead Sea Scrolls and other antiquities, 1215 seems so, you know, Middle Aged, not ancient.) Most of the other kids in line were just excited to get out of school for basically the whole day (I mean it - this was the mother of all lines we were waiting in), and the rock star-looking tour bus wasn't enough to interest them in some old piece of vellum. I, however, could hardly wait to see the actual Magna Carta.
Finally it was my turn to enter the neon-colored bus and see this seminal piece of Western history, and I wondered what language it would be in. I remembered hearing that there were four extant copies of the original 1215 version, and that two were in Latin, one was in French, and one was in the vernacular - Middle English, I suppose. When I got into the bus, some men told me gruffly to keep moving. Now I had not spent half my life in line with a bunch of brats who didn't care just to be told I got to walk past the Magna Carta without looking, so I dared to turn my head and look at the document. At that, one of the men barked, "Keep moving!" so I had to continue walking. All I saw was something that looked like a piece of yellowing rubber that had been scribbled on by a very dull pencil. Forget what language it was in - I didn't even get a good look at the thing!
To this day I have never gotten over the disappointment of having to walk past the Magna Carta, although later I learned there were all sorts of versions signed throughout the Thirteenth Century, so who knows which one it actually was? Just to add insult to injury, that evening in the local paper they had a story about some kid who had clearly gotten there much earlier in the day and was allowed to actually peruse the thing. They even had a photo of her peering at the glass-enclosed document with a puzzled look on her face, probably thinking, "What's the big whoop about this thing?" So all the adults in town could think the kiddies had an educational experience seeing an actual piece of history, and they had no idea they RUINED MY LIFE!!!
Famous Hat
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
And why to this poignant posting the ads are about building a stuffed bear or beer neon signs? Very odd. What is the purpose of going to the museum if not to look at stuff.
Post a Comment