a curious case

strange things happen when you go to a movie unprepared for how it will affect you.

this movie, this curious case of benjamin button, this movie was just one of those.

I was moved. It was well done. To say it was intense would be an understatement. At least for me and my experience. It wasn't a great film by any means. Too much like Forest Gump trying to get all those historical references intertwined in the film. Being in improbably locations and all that. Just not really all that amazing. The "growth" of Benjamin wasn't really all that "oh wow" but the emotions were played well. The cold icy feeling of the film enhanced the drama and the powerful emotions it stirred in me.

Despite the potentially flawed delivery of a film (LA Times did NOT like it) it moved me about as much as when I saw parsifal at Seattle Opera's new house. sad to compare a cinematic experience with an opera. but they are the two experiences that touch my biggest fear. the death or loss of a close loved one. I'm not afraid of dying. Not of death. It is a part of what being alive is all about. A student recently suggested being dead will be fantastic. No more worries. No more cares. The weight of life is lifted and you are free in death. No it isn't death that scares me. It is the loss. The emptiness at what is left behind when death happens. That scares me. And more than anything is the fear that I know it will happen, sometime. And every year that sometime draws closer and closer. No matter how well my parents or my wife take care of themselves they will eventually, as we all do, die. And that scares me. To my core. My father lost his father when I was but 1 or 2 years old. I have friends who've lost parents. Loved ones. I've lost grandparents but was saved from significant pain in a two fold way. One despite proximity and attempt, I never really grew close. I loved them, respected them and felt grateful to have them as grandparents but they never reached out to me they way my parents did. I know there are people who's parents never reached out to them. That's a sadness not to be addressed here and now. Two physical distance. We were never geographically close and that presented a temporal and spatial barrier that I was never able to overcome emotionally.

It doesn't help that these experiences, Parsifal and this movie, happen here when i am at the place I grew up mostly. With my mother. And despite my father's departure from here to the DC area when I was 8 or 9, I still have great and many memories of time spent here with him. I feel most connected to them here. And when presented with artistic explorations of love and loss it hits hard. I hurts. It scares me.

These are all words I can't come close to forming. I'd love to talk about this all. To verbalize it. But the words just rattle around in my head. They don't come out. That's been me all my life. I can come up every word and description for each emotion and where it came from and explain how I'm feeling and help people understand. But I can't form the words verbally and get them out. It frustrated my mother, my wife, old girlfriends. Any time I needed to verbalize emotions I was stricken dumb while words tossed around in my head. it was like that driving home from the movie. Words constantly streaming effortlessly in a monologue (like now) in my head. A voice over to what I'm seeing and focusing on. The rainy drive home was filled with words trying to talk through how the movie made me feel. Life is life.

We're given one hand to play. Often we can draw new cards. Toss the old ones and start fresh. But we're never really starting fresh. We always carry the old hands and how they were played with us. The game might change. Might be a different table but we are shaped by what is in our past. Heck when the old guy in Kung Fu Panda went up with the peach tree petals I got choked up. His words, Today is a gift that is why it is called the Present, ring true and so often get overlooked and forgotten.

Every day we have with out loved ones is a gift. I'm incredibly fortunate to have so many people that I love dearly. I am grateful for that gift. Grateful for a chance to get these words out of my head somewhere. I used to write in a black book. Journals. I guess this is just an extension of that habit, that way of getting these words out of my head. Often here I talk about pretty meaningless stuff. And every once in a while when something pops in my head I hope that maybe by writing it, maybe i can express it somehow to those who matter most.

I wonder how I will look back on this curious collection of words. Good film or not, the audience got up silently and left in a somber mood. Many people were visibly not moved by the film, seeing only the gimmickry of the reverse aging, being somewhat unimpressed by the setting of the reading of the journal. Certainly those issues crossed my mind. But they didn't detract from the power of the emotions the film stirred in me.

Heddwch
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