Of 2-piece swimsuits & William Wordsworth

Meow!

Feeling catty (although real cats probably don’t ever feel this way!): Women of all ages should be free to dress any way they please. That’s a given. Even when how “they please” doesn’t become them and/or draws stares and maybe even titters.

Case in point: 2 truly elderly women at “our pool” recently. They both wore 2-piece swimsuits, in which they looked inappropriate. . . even pathetic. Now why did they choose those suits? The only ones they had on hand? Their favorite suits (from long ago)? Thought they looked good? All – or none – of those reasons?

In a way, I almost admire their guts for doing this, especially considering all the 16-year olds (give or take) in 2-piece suits, wandering around the pool. But maybe these women weren’t gutsy, just oblivious.

Even thought I’d still speak in their defense for garbing up as they did, I can also wish they hadn’t done it. And I do.

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Come on, Bill: you’re with friends!  

Sorry, but I don’t buy this:

According to The Writer’s Almanac, “It was on this day in 1798 that the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, while on a walking tour of Wales with his sister, Dorothy, saw the ruins of Tintern Abbey, which inspired his poem ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.’ Wordsworth claimed the 1,200 lines came to him with the greatest of ease, entirely in his head.

“He said: ‘No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my notes. Not a line of it was altered, not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.’ ”

OK, it was another era, when people weren’t wrapped up in their “devices” and current events . . . but knowing how hard I find it to memorize others’ poems, or parts, I just can’t believe Wordsworth composed and remembered as he has described it. (Nor do I remember liking ‘Tintern Abbey’ very much, way back in British Lit.)
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