Poor Robin Crusoe

For a couple of days, I've been working on the dollhouse, and re-reading Robinson Crusoe for the first time in many years. My near vision is almost out, but I can still look a squirrel in the eye from 20 paces or so.

To answer the questions in late "Comments," about Dave W., he was the best friend of my best friend at the University. Karl was my special buddy, not to say my boyfriend, as he was a great handsome hulk who followed or carried me around, better than a dog or a horse but maybe not quite as intelligent. We all worked in Radio and Television, at the first educational radio-TV station to broadcast live on TV. (Karl once announced, in opening a radio program, "This is Karl Pickens Perking," instead of "Perkins speaking.")

Karl's best friend was Dave, who was about as tall as Michael Crichton, with flaming red hair, not handsome in the face but spectacular to look upon, and of course I had a crush on him, but he was engaged to a hateful little brunette that he could have thrown away with one hand, and I often wondered why he didn't. Years later I learned, through my sister-in-law (whose best friend, and a former roommate of mine at the U., was Dave's cousin), that he was a radio DJ and sometimes did comedy acts at local events, but I don't remember where that was, but not in Alabama.

Also a few years later, a friend of mine in college, Helen L., inherited a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and bought Karl a sports car, and they got married. Helen was almost as tall as Dave W., with flaming red hair and skinny as a rail and quite ugly. But that $150K at that time was probably equal to several millions of today's money. So hooray for Karl.
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Poor Robin

When Robinson Crusoe left England in 1651, not to return for 35 years, the English Civil War was raging, King Charles I had been beheaded in 1649 and his son fled to France or somewhere, and England was run by the Puritans, to be ruled for 7 years by Oliver Cromwell, a right handsome dude.

So while Crusoe was absent from England, the English civil war years had come and gone, Kings Charles I and II had come and gone, James II was the English monarch, and the Church of England restored. But all this time, Crusoe was still a Puritan, though at times, in Brazil and Portugal, letting himself be thought a "Popish" Catholic. He was marooned on his island for 28 years, and, contrary to modern impressions, for 25 of those years totally without human companionship, having rescued the savage Friday toward the end of his isolation. He did early on hear English spoken, by an island parrot that he tamed and taught to speak, such phrases as "Poor Robin Crusoe!"

What amazed me most about the book was the modernity of Defoe's usage and writing of the English language. Even some of his odd expressions and spellings are not strange to today's usage in England. Although since first reading the book, I had read Defoe's Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year, I was impressed all over again with the clarity and modernity of his English.

Considering that before Robinson Crusoe, published in the year 1719, there was no such thing as a fiction novel in the English language, I think it was the first and perhaps greatest of such, though with no plot and no explicit sexual references.

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I've lost a day somewhere. I thought this was Wednesday. Jed will be here tomorrow, and I haven't washed any clothes or cleaned the Augean stable in the basement.