Once upon a time there was a professor who lived a good, long life on Lookout Mountain, eventually moving to Signal Mountain. He will go unnamed to protect the innocent and the guilty. As a young teacher at the McCallie School, he taught English literature and the art of weight lifting. As an English professor at UTC, he taught the glories of Shakespeare, which he frequently embellished with colorful language and bawdy anecdotes. His flair for the dramatic lifted and energized the Holy Scriptures when it was his appointed time for the liturgical readings at his beloved Church of the Good Shepherd.
Some of you may have guessed who this legend might be, but I wonder if you’ve ever heard this story. On one of his journeys to England, the professor had occasion to visit the Shakespeare garden in Oxford, where, with stealth and cunning, he snipped several stems of mint. From thence he proceeded to smuggle the purloined mint through United States customs to be planted in his own garden on Lookout Mountain.
Being a generous good fellow, the professor shared the bounty of his garden with his brother-in-law Rolph Landry. (Now, can you guess the culprit of this story?) The English mint moved in a pot from the Landry home on East Brow to its present home in Black Creek. My friend Rolph, also a generous good fellow, shared some of the Shakespeare mint with me. After it had rooted and was flourishing in my garden, I espied, by chance, a director of this mountain tabloid purchasing mint at a local nursery this spring. I offered to share some of my English mint with her, promising that her writers would find inspiration from the magical herb.
And so it goes, the wandering mint spreads its fresh summer fragrance around the world and beyond the statutes of limitations for thievery and smuggling. May it continue to bless our Southern sweet teas, our Derby Day juleps, Rolph’s gin gimlets, and my Sunday morning mimosas as we worship online at “kitchen church” during the present plague.
Here’s an interesting footnote from the New Yorker, May 7, 2020:
Shakespeare lived his entire life in the shadow of bubonic plague. On April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the vicar, John Bretchgirdle, recorded the baptism of one “Gulielmus Filius Johannes Shakspere.” A few months later, in the same register, the vicar noted the death of Oliver Gunne, an apprentice weaver, and in the margins next to that entry scribbled the words “hic incipit pestis” (here begins the plague). On that occasion, the epidemic took the lives of around a fifth of the town’s population. By good fortune, it spared the life of the infant William Shakespeare and his family.
by Wiki Carter
Some of you may have guessed who this legend might be, but I wonder if you’ve ever heard this story. On one of his journeys to England, the professor had occasion to visit the Shakespeare garden in Oxford, where, with stealth and cunning, he snipped several stems of mint. From thence he proceeded to smuggle the purloined mint through United States customs to be planted in his own garden on Lookout Mountain.
Being a generous good fellow, the professor shared the bounty of his garden with his brother-in-law Rolph Landry. (Now, can you guess the culprit of this story?) The English mint moved in a pot from the Landry home on East Brow to its present home in Black Creek. My friend Rolph, also a generous good fellow, shared some of the Shakespeare mint with me. After it had rooted and was flourishing in my garden, I espied, by chance, a director of this mountain tabloid purchasing mint at a local nursery this spring. I offered to share some of my English mint with her, promising that her writers would find inspiration from the magical herb.
And so it goes, the wandering mint spreads its fresh summer fragrance around the world and beyond the statutes of limitations for thievery and smuggling. May it continue to bless our Southern sweet teas, our Derby Day juleps, Rolph’s gin gimlets, and my Sunday morning mimosas as we worship online at “kitchen church” during the present plague.
Here’s an interesting footnote from the New Yorker, May 7, 2020:
Shakespeare lived his entire life in the shadow of bubonic plague. On April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the vicar, John Bretchgirdle, recorded the baptism of one “Gulielmus Filius Johannes Shakspere.” A few months later, in the same register, the vicar noted the death of Oliver Gunne, an apprentice weaver, and in the margins next to that entry scribbled the words “hic incipit pestis” (here begins the plague). On that occasion, the epidemic took the lives of around a fifth of the town’s population. By good fortune, it spared the life of the infant William Shakespeare and his family.
by Wiki Carter
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