Last night I fell prey to one of the standard symptoms of dementia: reverting to the age I was when our movie night tradition first began, or maybe before that. Short-term memory gone, diving deep in the subconscious, I was a kid again. A kid who had not yet met her youngest sister, Davienne.
Poor, sweet baby Davy. When I snapped out of it, and Mom and Dad told me what happened, I held her and rocked her and told her that of course I remembered her, of course, of course. It was just that I was feeling sick, and my brain wasn’t working right.
She understood after a while. To make it up to her, I let her put stickers all over me.
Movie night started when I was eleven, Mom was pregnant with Davy. It was the first year we got a TV. Mom and Dad have always held the belief that staring at screens was bad for kids. That’s why I had to save up all my own birthday and Christmas money to buy this laptop, and why my parents still only carry flip phones. (Grandma and Grandpa bought me a smartphone last spring because they knew I used it to look things up for debate.) Anyway, it’s pretty understandable why they gave in. Three kids and a soon-to-be infant, two full-time jobs, and no options for a babysitter in a five-hundred-person town.
The ones I remember:
WALL-E: Harrison’s choice. First movie night ever. Dad accidentally burned the pizza but Mom ate it anyway. In fact, Mom was hugely pregnant and ate the whole thing herself. Mom and Dad were asleep by the end of the movie so Harrison and I started the DVD over from the beginning. When they woke up at midnight, they were astounded at how long the movie was. To this day they still think WALL-E is four hours long, with no dialogue, just robots beeping at each other, and will never let us watch it.
STAR WARS EP. 1: A few years later, I’m pretty sure Davy was two or three. It was Dad’s turn to pick, and he was excited to “encounter contemporary efforts at the classic science fiction franchise.” When Jar Jar Binks started talking, he grumbled, “What is this racist bullshit?” and all of us pretended like we didn’t hear him at first, but then Mom started laughing, and Davy yelled, “Bullshit!” Harry laughed so hard he cried.
MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO: Bette’s choice. She was around six. Coop came over for this one, because he loved Hayao Miyazaki, the filmmaker. He taught everyone how to pronounce the director’s name. The freakiest, most beautiful cartoon I had ever seen, full of colors and creatures, and it wasn’t all happy-go-lucky. It was about death and friendship and dark magic. Pretty sure this was when Bette discovered she might be from another planet. Every day for a month after she saw it, she wore Totoro ears she made out of construction paper, and stretched all her shirts out by putting pillows under them, chanting, “Totoro! Totoro!” One day I came home from school and found Coop in the front yard with her, prancing around, his shirt also stuffed with pillows.
THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG: My choice. (Well, Davy’s choice. At this point, I had discovered no one wanted to watch the political documentaries I liked.) We actually didn’t end up watching the whole movie, because Davy insisted on watching the song “Almost There” over and over, which annoyed Bette and Harrison so much that they hid the DVD one night after Davy fell asleep. Even now, as she’s doing something like coloring or filling out a worksheet from school, she’ll sing, over and over to herself, “People come from everywhere because I’m almost there, people come from everywhere because I’m almost there, people come from everywhere because I’m almost there…” I asked her once if she wanted to learn the rest of the song, or at least the right lyrics. “Nope!” she said.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: Mom’s choice. It was just me and her, because Dad had taken the kids up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in New Hampshire. We had just found out I had Niemann-Pick, and we didn’t know what it meant, really, or how long I would be seeing the geneticist. We snuggled on the couch and ate my favorite snack in the world that we almost never got, dark chocolate almonds. We laughed the most at Mrs. Bennet, how obsessed she was with marrying off her daughters like they were cattle, how nervous and nagging and silly the character was.
When it was over, and Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy had finally kissed and gotten married, I told her, “I’m glad you’re my mom. Not someone like that.”
Mom had wrapped her arms around me and held my head to her chest. “I’m glad you’re my daughter,” she said.
“Even if I’m sick?” I asked.
“Especially because you’re sick,” she had said, the vibrations of her voice soaking into my cheek. “I don’t think anyone less strong would be able to handle it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and burrowed deeper.
“My first baby,” she had said, and kissed the top of my head.
I remember it so well.
If nights like last night are going to happen again, it makes me glad I’m recording all this. Movie night isn’t just staring at a screen, it is also laughing, and crying, and fighting, and snuggling.
And I’m glad I’m writing the good and the bad. I’m glad I didn’t delete anything. What about all the moments that surround the good things? If you can only remember your aspirations, you will have no idea how you got from point A to point B.
That’s the reason why I’m writing to you, I guess, as opposed to just taking a bunch of pictures. A picture can only go so deep. What about the before and the after? What about everything that didn’t fit in the frame?
Life is not just a series of triumphs.
I wonder how many movie nights I missed for studying, or debate, or just complaining. I don’t want to miss any more.