Here’s what I have written so far this week. It ain’t much, but as detailed in Robin’s post below, life intrudes.
Every year, for Valentine’s Day, my friends Rosemary and Alf invite three or four couples for a gorgeous dinner at their house. The people around the table are pretty much the same ones every year: husbands and wives who have been together for decades. There were four couples this year, and if we added up the years of our marriages, I’m sure the total would be over 150. It’s my favorite party of the year.
One of the things that make it so is that Rosemary asks us to bring things to read. This year, my assignment was to write two limericks: one about young love and one about old. She knows I love writing limericks. Harkening back to Kate’s remark last week about sonnets not stifling creativity, I find the limerick form inspiring. It’s not easy at all for me to be humorous in prose, but the limerick unleashes my inner imp.
True to the scatological heritage of the form, I chose to focus on physical love. But in contrast to the usual stereotyping of women found in many classic limericks, I tried to the shed my satiric light on young and old male love. Viz:
The sex drive makes a young man just silly.
One glance at a nubile young filly,
Watch his reason depart;
Not his brain, not his heart,
All thought takes place in his willy.
Young men see a beauty and pant.
They want her the more if they shan’t.
But when grappling with sin,
Old men merely grin.
The brain thinks, but the organ just can’t.
--Annamaria Alfieri
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