Storytelling Week 12: Patience is a Virtue

Patience: "Building a sense of peaceful stability and harmony rather than conflict, hostility, and antagonism; resolving issues and arguments respectfully, as opposed to resorting to anger and fighting." 

"Just be patient, child," said Patience's father. It was about the billionth time he had been told those same three words. Patience was so sick and tired of the wait. He knew there was more to life out there than what he was experiencing in his village and he was determined to find it. Every day, he did the exact same thing. He woke up, ate breakfast, when outside to do work in the yard or fetch food and then came back home to eat dinner with the family. There is no way this was all he was born to do. He wanted to experience life, see new places and meet new people. His parents always told him his time would come, but "when would that be?" he thought.

One day after dinner, Patience's father could tell he was feeling down. He said, "Pat, I have something for you, I've been waiting to give it to you for a long time." He handed him a handheld mirror, decorated with different kinds of jewels. It was heavy and detailed, causing Patience to wonder how he had never come across it before. "What is it?" he asked. The mirror was capable of almost anything. You could tell it what you wanted to see and it would show you. The father demonstrated by saying, show me my wife. The mirror popped up with his wife doing dishes in the kitchen, exactly what she was doing at the very moment. Confused, Patience thanked his father and didn't really know what he was going to do with the mirror.

He sat around for a few days, staring into the mirror. At last, he knew just what he was going to do. He looked into the mirror and said, "Show me where I'm going to be in 10 years." The mirror stirred up a cloud of darkness for a few moments and then the image popped up, clear as day. It was Patience riding a white horse in the pasture of a gigantic, brick castle. The mirror showed him ride the horse to the back porch, where a women and two young kids were sitting watching the sunset. Just like that, at only 16 years old, he walked out of his house and never returned again. The first thing he did was go downtown to find a job and lucked out with a good starting position. He knew he wanted to be able to sustain his family the way the mirror showed he would. He arrived to work every day 2 hours early and stayed after to get ahead of everyone in the department. Over the next few years, he worked his way up to manager and just like the saying goes, hard work pays off. He eventually opened a company of his own. He was thriving at work, not missing the tiny village he came from for a single second.

Sure enough, he was on his lunch break one day and that girl with the wavy hair and sparkling eyes from the mirror walked in the bakery and he said, "There she is."

Bibliography: The Faerie Queene by Edmond Spenser

Patience Information

Author's Note: I read the story of the Faerie Queene by Edmond Spenser this week. It was a very interesting story because it is in the form of an epic poem, one of the longest poems written in English. I decided to change a lot of the characters and the plot of the story to make it my own, but I kept the mirror that could show anything you wanted to see as my main consistent detail with the original story. In the Faerie Queene, the mirror belonged to Britomart's father, and in my story Patience's father gives it to him when he feels he needs it the most. I chose to use the virtue Patience for my story because he represents the characteristic as he waits 16 years to go after the life he wants. Each day, he settled for what he knew he had to do until the timing was just right. In the Faerie Queene, many virtues were represented, but I chose one of my own to demonstrate my character correctly.