Love's not Time's fool

I've recently become re-enamored with A Prairie Home Companion, a radio variety show broadcast by American Public Media. If you've never heard of Garrison Keiller and his sardonic, satirical and hysterically funny humor, you must tune in. It usually airs on Sunday evenings, which usually means that I listen to it later in the week over the Internet. The May 5th show is especially wonderful -- a special poetry episode featuring Alan Ginsberg, Meryl Streep, Billy Collins and more. Every week, Keiller does a completely off-book monologue of the News from Lake Wobegon, the fictional location of the show, and this week he used one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets.

Suddenly, my mind was flooded with high school memories like the time my toilet flooded the bathroom because I couldn't figure out how to turn off the water. I had to memorize and recite this sonnet back in high school and as Keiller recited it on the show, I found myself reciting it along with him. I can't believe I remember all the words. I can't even remember to set the timer for my Trader Joe's frozen pizza. (Sucks when you burn your last frozen pizza to a crisp.) The human mind is a bizarre thing. Ah, highschool. I wore an afro during parts of highschool. Not on purpose, of course. It was perm gone miserably wrong. And then there was the time I got caught by the police while making out in parking lot with my boyfriend -- I tell you, they turn those lights on brighter when they know you're not wearing clothes. But my favorites memories from those days are the nights when me and a group of friends would just hang out at the elementary school playground, lying on our backs, trying to read the hidden language of the stars, putting into words life's deepest issues. We took ourselves so seriously when any adult probably would have laughed us off. But that's what high school is all about it, isn't it?

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.