Well baby, you’ll no doubt figure out your own opinion of me. It’ll be an opinion blessed with wonderment while you’re a baby; joy and rapture and a touch of rules. As you grow, you’ll notice my faults. You’ll start to see faults I never knew existed and you’ll experience anger and eventually disappointment that I’m no longer the hero you thought I was. But then, I hope with all my heart, you’ll have babies of your own and the old fuddy duddy I’ve become will suddenly be lined in golden rapture once more. Not quite as thick as it once was, but joy and rapture nevertheless.
I don’t completely know myself and I hope I never will, but I can tell you this much. Since I was a child I’ve been a dreamer, an imaginer of things and stories and spaces. Ultimately, a writer. It’s been my fear, my love and my self.
So when you wonder who I was to me, remember this poem (although I can spell quite well!) And that I have loved you more than you will ever imagine.
So That’s Who I Remind Me Of
By Ogden Nash
When I consider men of golden talents,
I’m delighted, in my introverted way,
To discover, as I’m drawing up the balance,
How much we have in common, I and they.
Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle,
Like Shakespeare, little Latin and less Greek;
I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;
Like Thackeray, I have a snobbish streak.
I’m afflicted with the vanity of Byron,
I’ve inherited the spitefulness of Pope;
Like Petrarch, I’m a sucker for a siren,
Like Milton, I’ve a tendency to mope.
My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;
Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die
(I also drink my coffee from the saucer);
And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I.
Like Villon, I have debits by the carload,
Like Swinburne, I’m afraid I need a nurse;
By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,
And I dream as much as Coleridge, only worse.
In comparison with men of golden talents,
I am all a man of talent ought to be;
I resemble every genius in his vice, however heinous—
Yet I write so much like me.
About Rebecca
