Imagining a Queen

Queen Elizabeth II passed away today. It’s rather odd to me. She’s been Queen for as long as I have been alive. It’s hard to imagine what her life must have been like.

I could talk about her legacy, what she did, or a hundred other things. Some people would wonder why I would bother. She was a queen, after all. I’m a American, and a Libertarian. We’re not particularly noted for our love affair with royalty.

When the world changes, though, you take notice. And try to understand.

She got to be the Queen, you see.

The price she paid for that was that she had to be the Queen.

That’s something I don’t think many people understand. I can’t entirely comprehend it, myself. I can see the outlines of the enormity of that task. And it is enormous.

So that’s why I find myself thinking about her differently at the moment. I’m not mulling over the geopolitical situation, or whether Charles will further reduce the influence of the royal family, or anything like that.

No, I’m thinking about her as a person, and about her sense of humor.

There are going to be dead queen jokes, you see. I know - I’ve already seen a bunch. I know that I’m going to laugh at them, too, because I already have. Heck, I've made a few myself.

For the most part, I like to think she'd chuckle at them as well.

She struck me as someone who was incredibly down to earth. She didn't have a lot of room in her life for self-deception. She had to do her best to see things as they were. There was a lot of bad in her life, and not all of it was due to her own choosing.

Once you deal with a certain amount of crap in your life that you can't ignore, you have a choice. You can become a bitter, twisted shell of a person. Or you can learn to find humor where you can - because otherwise, you have no humor at all.

From what I saw, the Queen still had her sense of humor. There’s too many stories along those lines for it all to have been mere publicity. Too many instances where the wild-eyed impetuousness of a WWII ambulance driver shone through.

There’s a real reason that the British people loved her and were proud to have her as their Queen for so many years.

But what do I know? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she wouldn’t have seen the humor in all the variations of this image that I’ve posted over the years, every Fourth of July.

I like to think she would have.

I’m American, and a Libertarian. We don’t cotton to royalty.

We do rather like people with a sense of humor, though.

Fair winds and following seas, ma’am.