Upon returning from JA and going out to lunch with Ken and the boys (who will from here on out be referred to as K, S and R, Gossip Girl style, xoxo), we took a stroll around Concord. Concord is actually a pretty picturesque little town, I highly recommend the Main Street Deli and Comina, which my moms friends husbands mom owned for a while and has the most amazing furniture / rugs / pillows / basic housewares I've ever seen. Anyways that's not where Ken took us. He took us to the town hall which is now a Unitarian church with an interior that looks suspiciously like the inside of Lee Chapel.
He took us here because this place, as well as the tavern next to it, have historical significance in the time surrounding the Revolution. K has his heart set on making sure that we leave this internship with a basic understanding of why we shouldn't perform self-lobotomy because we;re in Concord and not downtown Boston, so it was a nice gesture. In the basement of the church (more church basements, can't get away), there was a picture of K's personal heroes, the Transcendentalists. Maybe you've heard of them - Thoreau (whose name is apparently pronounced thorough, not thor-OWE), Emerson, etc. Well this guy named Oliver Wendell Holmes also apparently hung out with them, and here is where I make my sorority girl blunder numero uno.
K claims he doesn't know much about Holmes' body of work, but something in his name rings a bell for me. I get all excited to show off that I do, in fact, know something about history, and start rambling out loud. Holmes was a poet. I know that. He wrote something really nationalistic I think. It was turned into a song. The Star Spangled Banner? The inscription on the Statue of Liberty? I'm all over the place here but I KNOW that I know that Oliver Wendell fucking Holmes wrote something that, at one point in my life, I had to commit to memory.
Hil, do you see where this is going yet? If not I'm kind of disappointed. Well once I get excited about something I really don't give up until I've figured it out, so I'm frantically searching OWH poems on the crackberry trying to prove to mah boiz that I'm not actually retarded. They're all already giving me blank looks and starting to move on, but you know I never quit when I'm on a roll. So I search search search and SUDDENLY there in front of me I see it.
The Chambered Nautilus.
The Kappa Delta Poem.
I don't even want to say it. I just made a huge deal about how Holmes was something that I KENW I learned and was comparing it to, say, the National Anthem, and there on my blackberry screen is the one stupid little poem we had to memorize everytime fucking Kristie Noel decided to show her face in Lex. In case you forgot how it goes, here it is:
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
That snippet is apparently only the last verse of the entire poem, but it all flooded back to me and I got super embarrassed and mumbled something about a sorority poem and shut myself up for the rest of the walk through the church. Thanks for nothing, Kappa Delta.
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