I’ve learned the most from my dad when we’re sitting in the dark with our mouths closed, my head on his shoulder as the opening credits flicker into place.
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My father and I are serious about movies. Like see 70-80 a year in the theater serious. Like take monetary bets on the Oscars serious. Few things rival our devotion to the cinema, save a shared love of old-fashioned root beer and the tearful loyalty we reserve for the Cleveland Indians. But the movies—the oddly bouncy seats, the best ones ripped and worse for wear, the popcorn with butter held and the lights dimming into shades of dusk over our heads—that’s sacred. That’s ours.
For my entire life, my father has kept a log of every movie I’ve ever seen in the theater, most of them seen with him. It starts in 1993, when I was two, with “Homeward Bound,” talking-dog-road-trip-extravaganza of yore. There are almost 1,000 films on that list, a sheaf of notebook paper he keeps creased and paper clipped behind the pens on his desk. In this way, my father is as much a reporter as I am, the both of us believers in the art and significance of documentation, of remembering and respecting a shared history. This is our relationship maintenance, a happily performed ritual that reminds us who we are and what we value.
The fact is, I’ve learned the most from my father when we’re sitting in the dark with our mouths closed, my head on his shoulder as the opening credits flicker into place.
♦◊♦
For my dad, movies are the benchmarks by which he measures time, the framework that has bolstered his life. As the only child of quiet, reserved parents who never traveled, watching “The Magnificent Seven” with his father in 1960 made his entire year. When Yul Brenner sauntered into the open West, I imagine him picturing the great spinning world beyond his Cleveland street, thinking of the hundreds of scenes that go into a life, the scrap of magic a single frame can give you to take home.
From then on, my father made movies his business. When he was drafted during the Vietnam War, there was a movie theater a few miles from Fort Knox, his basic training camp. He went multiple times a week, sometimes alone, to again feel the wonder down to his bones when the lights went down. When he met my mother during graduate school, she was the director of student late night activities—specifically, she picked the films played at the campus theater, organized entire festivals around Hitchcock classics and Spaghetti Westerns. On one of their best-remembered dates, they went to go see “Animal House” two times in a row in 1978, clutching hands and grinning as John Belushi started a food fight up on the celluloid.
These memories he carries with him, the scenes as glittering and crystal as a good parting shot. And now he makes them with me. When he takes me to the movies, my father lets me in to his sanctuary, one that was often a solitary getaway for him when depression struck, the money was tight or he missed his father, who died in 1978. The seats, the screen, this is space we now share.
♦◊♦
While other dads and children have sports, or a shared job, or religion, my father has shaped my life through the culture he has exposed me to, the big issues that he first couched by taking me to the cinema or dropping off a load of books from the library. For example, when I was 14, I went to go see “Brokeback Mountain” with my dad. My friends couldn’t get over it.
“Oh my god, you watched a gay sex scene with your dad.”
But to me, the point was less that he had taken me to a movie about two gay lovers—the point was that he watched it like any other love story. By the end, he had tears in his eyes, and we talked about the sacrifices we’d be willing to make for love all the way home. No, really.
Because he treated it like it wasn’t a big deal, a momentous, uncomfortable fire poker that I couldn’t broach with him, I never felt uncomfortable asking him about anything. Movies tackling issues of drugs and sex and violence and social injustice were often followed up by trips to the local library, where my dad would check out books on all the things I’d asked about, and we’d go through the pages together.
For us, the movies were not a substitute for conversations—they were what started them. And when I asked if he’d ever done what we’d seen on the screen, he told the truth. He never hid his past for me, the rusty outtakes he might like to hide, never made a veiled comparison to a movie character and uncomfortably made his exit. He was and is always honest with me, and now, I think, it was the movies that opened the door.
When my father and I hit a rough patch during high school (a common case of hormones and my apparent belief that you aren’t an adult until you’ve thrown your angst all up in someone’s face), I was reminded most often at the movies how similar we really were, that he wouldn’t lump me in with the rest of the stereotypical teenagers. I could tell where my father stood by how he reacted to the characters on screen, and I often felt the same way. I knew what would make him cry (the father-daughter scene at the end of “Mulan” will always get him going), the types of laughs that would hit him in the gut, the sweeping vistas that would get a loud “Whoa.” The fights we had were put into perspective. This is my father I thought. This person is part of me.
Through those rough years, the worst of which I’d like to edit out if I could (oh, movie joke!), the movie log never dwindled. The angst and repeated frustrations I felt with my father, with myself, never translated into me ditching him for my friends. To stop that would be almost as bad as to stop talking to him all together. The log lengthened, the pages continued, and my father and I ate popcorn until kernels came out of our nose.
When he dropped me off for college, my dorm room unpacked and tears rolling over my bottom lids, he hugged me close, told me he loved me and then said:
“Maybe I’ll come down and we can see a movie some time,”
So this Father’s Day, Dad and I will get our tickets. I’ll curl my legs into a ball in my seat, while he goes to get a soda (half-diet, half Pepsi, please). And when the lights go down, I swear, if you saw us, you’d see the child I have always been, will always be, leaning on his shoulder, waiting for the magic to start all over again.
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Photo: Flickr, The Movies Online
TY Peach for a great Father’s Day.