In Haste: Stand By Me

As I lay down to sleep tonight, I ponder on my Fiancee, and the life I'll get to live with her -- the magic in it all. I also think about how it's already getting hard to imagine a world where I don't see her or at least hear her every day. It's such a strange thought to realize that a day is coming, and quickly, where the life I led before marriage will be a mirage, something I can't quite ever remember sufficiently. How strange that will be. The person I've so long identified myself as, Dante Stack, Christian, from California, renown breaker of printers, single; that self will no longer be myself.

What dreams may come? Yes, indeed quite so. But I'll add also, what dreams, both poisonous and worthy of remembrance, I once was, and now slowly fail to comprehend.

Yes, what dreams did come. 

Swinging Bridges

Sorcerer, 1977

I have never served in the military, so take this comment with a mouth full of salt.  I find many aspects of the Randall Wallace flick, We Were Soldiers as just plain trite.  It's difficult not to view the film as a whole as part of Mel Gibson's inevitable march through war history on film.  When I first saw the film in theaters in 2002, I found the film's ending narration, the bop-you-on-the-head listen-to-this-part-because-it's-the-theme-of-the-whole-darn-film part as particularly trite.

We Were Soldiers, 2002

Some had families waiting. For others, their only family would be the men they bled beside. There were no bands, no flags, no Honor Guards to welcome them home. They went to war because their country ordered them to. But in the end, they fought not for their country or their flag, the fought for each other.

That final line sounded to me like a cop-out.  They fought because our country was afraid of Russian commies (or something like that) not because they liked the guy beside them.  The whole deal resonated with me like one of those chocolate cherries that your grandmother buys you for Christmas.  It sounds like a good idea, but then you bite into it and this goo drips down your chin and the whole thing is just gagingly sweet.  

Stand by Me, 1986

3 years later.  It's about 7:30pm on a brisk November night at Biola University.  It's a Wednesday, which means I am strolling around outside during the 15minute break of my evening Systematic Theology course.  It's just past twilight.  I'm in a good mood this day.  I am whimsical, even.  At this moment I'm circling around the ugly fountain, just about ready to head back in for the second half of the lecture, when everything dims.  

The electricity has gone out.  I begin to walk with hurried pace.  By this point in my Biola history, I had grown quite accustomed to electrical outings.  Biola had its own mini power plants, and during this period of population growth, it wasn't rare to lose power for a bit school wide.  I enjoyed such episodes generally.  There's something about power outages that breeds childhood joy within me.  

Where was I going?  I wasn't heading back to class?  Nor was I going back to my dorm to come up with some great adventure to relish with my droogies.  No, without even realizing it, I was walking toward my girlfriends dorm.  To check on her.  To make sure she was okay in the dark.  My feet decided to do this before I ever consciously made such a decision.

I tell this brief anecdote not to dwell on the past for the sake of pastness, but because it stood as a moment in my life (the first?), where my first thought was for someone beside myself.  It was instinctual.  I didn't need to resolve to do a good thing for another.  My impulse was for the good of not-me. 

Horton Hears a Who!, 2008

What a splendid sensation to encounter.  Watching We Were Soldiers today, I can know what it means to fight for the person beside you.  I can feel it.  And I can know why that is something that is worth living for. 

Flip to the other end.

Everyone knows that William Friedkin's The French Connection has the best car chase of all time.  But now I can say without hesitation that his 1977 flick "Sorcerer" has the all-time best swinging bridge scene I've ever endured. 

Part of what makes the bridge episode so darn intense (as well as the whole film), is that our protagonists aren't living for anyone other than themselves.  

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 1984

There's a futility in that idea.  When you strive for the betterment of someone else, you are offering them hope and grace.  When you strive for yourself, what are giving yourself?  Possessions.  Maybe a personal sense of accomplishment.  But you can't give yourself hope.  You can't accumulate hope like that.  

Friedkin's characters look after themselves first, foremost, and finally.  

He is a bleak director.

Two Yearnings

I remember: my mother playing music from the 50's while she dusted the house.  She had a 'The Fabulous 50's' cd that became a regular hit for the two of us at midmorning.  It felt like it was always 10:30am with an easy sunlight leaking through the window.  This is a peaceful memory, a peaceful moment, before the great adventure that is the public education system enveloped my life.

I can hear wind chimes.  I can listen to the music.  I can, in a way, grasp what things looked like.  But what is gone is how I really felt -- who I was then.  I can no longer be that person.  I enjoy hanging out with children and playfully acting the part of the naive adult, but it is only acting.

My memory is mostly still intact from much of my childhood, but the feeling, the empathy, that has left me.

Hearts in Atlantis is an adaptation of a Stephen King short story that I somehow didn't devour amidst my early teenage obsession with the horror writer.  Like most of his non-horror stories, this one dealt with the end of childhood -- much in the same way that Stand by Me is.  It's sacred ground is the quintessential 'last summer of boyhood' - that nostalgic era perfectly stylized in The Sandlot.

Perhaps the film doesn't have too much to give, but it's own sentiment.  That's okay, I think... more than okay, really.

What I experienced while watching the film was not nostalgia, rather, it was longing enmeshed with a snippet of dread.  I have come to realize that childhood has departed from me, perhaps in the fullest sense.  On this earth, I reckon I will never own it again.  There's a divide between me and it now.  As the film played out, I could put myself inside the shoe of the over-the-hill Anthony Hopkins role before I could imagine myself as the budding boy.  How can that be?  I am but 10 or 11 years removed from the boy, and 50 years have I still to live until I resemble the old man.  How did I lose that so fast?

What was it like?  And who was I?  Is it the same me now that lived then?  Am I the all-grown-up version of my youth?  When I think of stories from my childhood, there's a separation I make between me and the boy-me.  We don't seem like one and the same.  Strange.

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I foresee: a second yearning that is stronger than the first.  I get a dose of it from time to time.  Most recently I found it while inhaling the trailer for Sofia Coppola's new film, Somewhere.

It's not that I particularly want to have children.  I don't, per se.  Being a member, or even a father, of a happy family doesn't overwhelm my soul.

Here's the proper ingredients needed for the welling up of this particular yearning within me.

1) Being a thoroughly broken man.  

2) Having a desperate hope to shield your progeny from this brokenness.  

It's a completely streamlined life.  To live for a son or daughter.  To say to God, 'I know I blew it for myself, but with all that's left of me, I will live so that my kin might have a chance.'  Also necessary for the formula is that said offspring have no other person they could look to -- so, in my case, the mother can't be in the picture.

I guess when it comes down to it, I have a great desire to aspire to be a single parent.

Shoot, when I say it like that it just sounds weird.

The bridge between these two yearnings (a feeling of childhood and a fondness for a specific type of parenthood) is simple: innocence.  The child is innocent intrinsically.  The hopeless, personally wrecked Father is innocent because he has resigned himself from his own aspirations.  I think it may be the only way to return to a pure place of innocence while on this earth.

The ending moments of Stand by Me remind us that we've been listening to a memoir.  The author of the memoir takes one final moment to reflect on his last childhood adventure:

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"