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Talk is Cheap

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Sunday, January 29, 2006

Movies As Metaphor

Movies are the metaphors for my life.  

This Sunday morning after breakfast, I dozed on the couch and woke to Reunion at Fairborough (1985), in which an aging Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr play wartime lovers reunited after 40 years.  Art imitates art because it also marked the screen reunion of the two actors, who had last appeared together in Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957).

Like a weird mental time capsule, movies freeze time permanently.  When I am watching, I too become whatever I was, wherever I was.

Watching Heaven, I am an 11 year old on a Saturday afternoon at the Globe Theatre on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, New York. Watching Fairborough, I am in Washington, D.C. watching television on the rust-colored velvet couch in my living room in Glover Park.

Of course, in actuality, I’m the same age that Mitchum and Kerr were supposed to be in the Fairborough movie and both of those actors have already been dead for years.  

Last night, while channel surfing, I glimpsed another Mitchum movie, Not As a Stranger, an overwrought Hollywood version of the A.J. Cronin novel that I was reading on the night in January 1962, when my father died. In the moments it took to surf to another channel, I was again a 15 year old high school girl who was convinced that reading about someone dying in the novel was a harbinger of my own father’s death.  

My sister’s birthday celebration this week was like that too. There was a cake and presents and each of the celebrants had known each other for several decades, since childhood and therefore knew what part the other was playing, what had gone before and what was coming next.

Yet as much as we laughed and talked and felt like we always had; despite the appearance of time frozen, if anything, time was entirely too fluid and changeable.  

For starters, this small celebration took place in a nursing home.  My sister’s multiple sclerosis has made her both paraplegic and ravaged by the medical complications wrought by kidneys that no longer function properly.

How can my thoughts still feel the same as they had when I was still a girl but be lodged in a mind that is thinking in a 60 year old body?  

I look down at my hands typing on my computer keyboard and I am again in junior high school learning how to type. I hate the classroom and the teacher who fails anyone looking down at their fingers.  Fat lot of good anyway.  The key letters are blanked out.  

Now when glance down, I see the loose skin of an old woman.  These are not my hands!  But of course they are mine.

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