It's Your (My) Movie

You enter the dark theater with dilated eyes which do not yet see, the movie has already started. It’s your movie with a cast of thousands as they used to say. An epic almost eighty-nine years in the making. You’ve aged more than a bit but you are still the leading man.

Spencer Tracy is impersonating your father but he can’t quite. Your mother may be a loud Shelley Winters or Ethel Merman playing to the last row in the balcony. She’s in combat and she’s scared. She hasn’t heard the war is over.

You have dodged the usual movie maladies, the cough that was T.B., the headache that would become a tumor which killed your dear friend, that one more for the road your brother died with in his bloodstream.

You aren’t the second banana in this film or the guy who refused to lay low till the heat’s off and did a stretch in the big house taking the rap for packing a rod.

And you aren’t the sheriff who nabbed the cattle rustlers in the bar room brawl. But you have your eye on the schoolmarm.

As the arc on the big screen begins to sag (I don’t know why you say goodbye) you find your eyes and your heart. You find Peggy. (I say Hello.) Now it’s the greatest love story never told. It’s the first meeting twenty-five years after the first non-meeting. That intersection at the poetry reading, ordained. Can the camera catch the intervals, this change of pronouns? My needless dithering? Your knowing? Our meshing? The devotion in our dailiness? Can the language of cinema convey how we lived in a country off the map and knew when to not speak as our silences grew more articulate?

Knowing how to live prepared her for knowing how to die. Up so floating many bells down…She reaped her sowing / and went her came / sun, moon, stars, rain.*

Hello again. The movie is not altogether done. Maybe the credits are rolling but I'm still up there on the big screen behind the cameo roles, the gaffer and the grip. That's me getting a grip.

* e.e.cummings, Anyone Lived In a Pretty How Town