View from the North 40: As the Revolution turns

I have been watching a television series based on events and people involved in the American Revolution and it is clear to me that, had I lived at that time in history, the likelihood of my survival to old age would have been roughly nil.

First off, it’s unlikely I could have managed to survive childhood and early adulthood.

Aimless children prone to daydreaming rather than working were killed either by accident or out of frustration — or flat out to save money to buy food and clothing for worthwhile children. Those were practical times.

If I wasn’t culled from the familial herd as a youngster — by weakness of nature or lack of nurture — I would have had to survive the obstacles of early adulthood.

I don’t know what kind of man would’ve wanted me, and that was a big deal back then. I might have had to make my own way, and living off my own gumption and wits seems equally as unlikely as my survival of childbearing with my narrow hips and what passed for modern medicine at the time.

My luck, though, it would have been the dresses that did me in. I would trip over a full skirt and the resulting wound would go septic, which equalled death, or I would become crippled from the fall which, I understand, was a real drain on quality of life in the nonindustrialized eras.

Or I would have suffocated in a corset because what I lack in breadth of pelvis, I make up for in expanse of chest cavity that is ill-suited to being trussed up.

At some point, someone would have tied me up in an industrial-strength corset in an attempt to give me a more feminine outline. I would have keeled over at a party, and everyone would have shrugged and said “Pamela, she always was a cheap drunkess,” then dragged me into a corner to sleep it off — not realizing that I was going into the sleep from which a body does not return. Death, yes, I mean death by compression of the lungs.

The number two most-likely cause of my demise in 18th century America would have been lack of developed roadways.

Want to off me without paying for a hit man? Set me loose in the woods and tell me to “follow that ridge to the base of the hill and bear east for a mile.” I will get lost, helplessly and hopelessly, somewhere off on the wrong ridge, before I even have a chance to fail at figuring out which direction east is. From there, any imaginable deep-woods-survival fail could occur.

Should I have managed to live long enough to see the American Revolution, I would not have survived the times because my smart mouth would not have understood the danger of my inattentive brain’s inability to retain political details.

I’d be all “Wow! With a big pile of fake white hair like that on your head, you must be a really important Wig.”

“The term is Whig, madam, not wig. I am a staunch Tory with direct ties to the crown,” the Brit would say.

“Land a’goshen, sir! I totally didn’t mean to question your patriotism to her majesty the queen,” I’d say to, y’know, smooth things over.

But the bloke would be all, like, “I am no rutting Patriot, fool. I am a Loyalist, loyal to his majesty king of the British Empire.”

“Aye-yi, cap’n,” I’d say in my best British pirate accent.

“His lordship to you, hag. Lieutenant, throw this woman into the brig until she understands the many errors of her ways,” the lord of ships would say, pronouncing lieutenant in the very British “left-tenant” way — to which I would be compelled to reply:

“Left tenant? Blimey, Limey, where does the right one live?” and have my nervous laughter cut short by:

“Just kill her now.”

Thus would end my Revolutionary contribution.

(Oh, well, I’m not much into heroics anyway at [email protected].)