Outside the box, under the chin

[Canadian Vet]

I doubt that Rabbie Burns would have minded.
He was out the window tout suite when the husband came home.
He might have even paused for a few minutes to roll some dice.
It's painful to watch the snobs sanitize Burns.

[jsrnephdoc]

It's painful to watch the snobs sanitize Burns.

Except that his own published work contains exactly some of that same sanitization.

My Dad was an Episcopalian Priest (Anglican for those in the UK). My sibs and I grew up with my parents calling each other "Jo" and "Jo Jo," interchangeably. I don't think I EVERY heard one of them address the other using their Christian names. We never knew or questioned why (after all, those SOUNDS were familiar to us probably before we had any understanding of what "words" were.

We discovered why only more than a decade after my Dad's death in his late 70s, when my mom succumbed, still vigorous, to an ACCIDENTAL injury at age 92.

My sibs and I gathered at their bucolic wooded lakeside retirement cottage in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and, during a lull in our preps for her funeral I pulled an anthology of Burns verse from my Dad's bookcase, wherein I discovered John Anderson, my Jo, a truly lovely (and respectable) anthem to romance enduring through the decades.

It was only two decades STILL later (actually, when I began reading that poem at annual Burns Night gatherings in honor of my parents) that I discovered Burns did NOT birth that poem from nothingness. It was actually firmly embedded, in FAR more ribald (and I may say, amusing) fashion, in highland culture. I'd quote it here, but it probably would not survive the moderators' inquisition.

Oh, one more detail. My mom, a VERY prim and respectable English Literature and French language teacher, was buried in her Robertson Red kilt and waistcoat.

BUT the mortician outfitted her with THE PLEATS IN FRONT, so there's probably room for an additional verse in the Beatles ballad Roll Over, Beethoven.

[Canadian Vet]

Except that his own published work contains exactly some of that same sanitization.

My Dad was an Episcopalian Priest (Anglican for those in the UK). My sibs and I grew up with my parents calling each other "Jo" and "Jo Jo," interchangeably. I don't think I EVERY heard one of them address the other using their Christian names. We never knew or questioned why (after all, those SOUNDS were familiar to us probably before we had any understanding of what "words" were.

We discovered why only more than a decade after my Dad's death in his late 70s, when my mom succumbed, still vigorous, to an ACCIDENTAL injury at age 92.

My sibs and I gathered at their bucolic wooded lakeside retirement cottage in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and, during a lull in our preps for her funeral I pulled an anthology of Burns verse from my Dad's bookcase, wherein I discovered John Anderson, my Jo, a truly lovely (and respectable) anthem to romance enduring through the decades.

It was only two decades STILL later (actually, when I began reading that poem at annual Burns Night gatherings in honor of my parents) that I discovered Burns did NOT birth that poem from nothingness. It was actually firmly embedded, in FAR more ribald (and I may say, amusing) fashion, in highland culture. I'd quote it here, but it probably would not survive the moderators' inquisition.

Oh, one more detail. My mom, a VERY prim and respectable English Literature and French language teacher, was buried in her Robertson Red kilt and waistcoat.

BUT the mortician outfitted her with THE PLEATS IN FRONT, so there's probably room for an additional verse in the Beatles ballad Roll Over, Beethoven.

My dad only ever did Ogden Nash : "Hippity hoppity. Here comes a Wapiti"

... even though our sirname is that of one of Burn's many paramours.