My fiancee, Sandy, and I just returned from a MUCH needed weekend away to Lake Okoboji. I was becoming increasingly burnt out and frustrated with my horrible job and that translated into a surliness that even my beloved fiancee was losing patience with.
We cut off most correspondence to the outside world and just immersed ourselves into quiet moments on the lake, nice meals, discussions with friends, fishing and just relaxing. We even squeezed in a round of miniature golf, which Sandy won by ONE stroke. Dinner last night was on me.
Anyway, we returned to Des Moines after an annoying drive home (there were several construction detours) around 6:30 last night. Sandy's mom had been dogsitting for us.
Recently, Sandy's mom has been helping a niece hold a rather large estate/yard/antiques sale in Villisca and so it is not unusual for us to come home on any given evening and seeing some kind of trinket or tool that had been found in the Villisca house and which Sandy's mom thinks may be useful to us.
But last night... last night, the gift left on the dining room table was much more beloved, useful and intriguing than any of it's predecessors.
I came home last night to an ancient, yellowed copy of Hamlet. Signet Classics Sixth Printing. Copywright 1963. It cost 50 cents brand new. The pristine new Folger Edition of Hamlet I just bought, copywright 1992, printed 2009, cost me a full $6.00.
What's so valuable about a worn old copy of Hamlet? Probably nothing, monetarily. It's likely worth less now than the 50 cents it was purchased for, but to me, it's absolutely priceless. There's a color drawing by Milton Glaser on the cover and a wealth of textual notes and references in the back (most modern editions these days put these notes and treatise in the front of the books, before the script itself)
How did this delightful little nugget of Shakespeare find me at the very time I am beginning a Hamlet journey? How is it that the found object is Hamlet and not Midsummer or Macbeth or Henry V? I may never know, but it feels like so much more than coincidence...
