whimsical wednesday at the whimsey project! our day to delve into whimsical activities. today's activity involves reading. select a book, magazine article or other reading material that you have not read before. close your eyes and randomly select a page to read. (no starting at the beginning!!) read the random page and share the results with the whimsey project! were you lost? confused? intrigued? enticed to read the entire work?
the book i selected was wordsworth classics, tales from shakespeare by mary and charles lamb. the book is for non-shakespeare readers, being in prose one can actually follow and understand! the first random page i selected and began reading was romeo and juliet. i knew that one too well to continue so i selected another page. this time the selection was macbeth. the king has come to visit macbeth at his home and lady macbeth is plotting the king's murder. she resolved to undertake the task as her husband could not be relieved upon to carry out the deed. the plot thickens! the page ended with half a sentence at a climatic point in the story. i just might have to keep reading!
I missed Whimsical Wednesday yesterday, but, as you know, I spend a lot of time reading so decided to do the activity this Thursday morning. There aren't a lot of books in my bookshelf that I haven't read (husband and son have some but they are so outside of my interest zone I hunted for a book on my shelves) but I found Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation Speaks. The page I opened to was about nurses killed during war, specifically at Anzio. There was a letter written from a lady who was diagnosed with scarlet fever 10 days after her son was born. She was quarantined in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NYC for 3 weeks. Her husband was able to get one of only a couple of nurses available for private duty for this mother. The nurses name was Blanche. Blanche and mother developed quite a bond. Blanche shared she was going into the army and one day hoped to be a doctor. They corresponded over the next several years. One letter mother sent to Blanche was returned marked deceased. No other information.
ReplyDeleteThe letter continued to tell of mother's brother who served in the Philippines and married an army nurse. When they came back to the U.S., mother told her sister-in-law nurse about her dear Blanche realizing it was a long shot she might know anything. But, she did know of Blanche. She was killed in Anzio when the Germans shelled the hospital. There was a cargo ship named after her and mother was able to spot the ship on the news when it was in the port of New York.
Then the story ended until mother read the chapter titled "Women in Uniform and Out" in The Greatest Generation where she read "Ellen Ainsworth, killed by German artillery shell, one of six nurses to die at Anzio", Blanche being one of the six. Mother wrote, "Now, so many years later, at 18 years of age, I am able to shed tears in her dear memory".
Wow! What a sweet memory and tribute to Nurse Blanche and the services she provided! This has intrigued me and so the book isn't going back on the shelf to "wait until someday" but sitting by my chair to picked up and read when I have time!
wow! that's really neat! the story and the fact that you are intrigued to continue to read the book you read randomly!
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