People’s homes burn to ashes
The air turns yellow with smoke
We listen for evacuation notices
Deciding what to take if we have to go
People flee for their lives
One step ahead of the flames
Like a war zone
The chatter and roar of aircraft fills the sky
Heroic firefighters risk their lives
So that ours may be saved
Friends and family come together
To comfort and grieve
Our sacred wild places are reduced to ashes
Again
I miss the movies, the especially the smell of popcorn. I love to stand by the snack counter and watch the popper at work. The stainless steel tub rotates as it stirs the oil and unpopped kernels. When the oil reaches just the right temperature the staccato sound of popping begins. Slowly at first, it gathers in speed and intensity until it sounds like a hundred firecrackers exploding all at once. Popcorn begins spilling from the lid of the tub in an avalanche of white, slowly filling the clear rectangular box that the tub sits inside of. The twin aromas of warm butter and popped corn kernels are simply intoxicating to me. Of all our senses, smell is the strongest activator of memory. Whenever I smell freshly popped popcorn, I’m immediately transported inside the comforting confines of a movie theater.
My mom always worked at the movies so I basically grew up inside a movie theater. She began as a ticket taker and candy girl and gradually worked her way up to theater manager. Up until I moved to California as an adventure seeking 22 year old, I never once paid to get into any movie theater in our area. All my mom had to do was call the theater manager and I’d be on the guest list.
Like most small towns in the 60’s and 70’s, my hometown of Caldwell, NJ had a single screen movie theater. The Park Theater opened in 1925 and was a classic example of the movie theater architecture of that era; plush carpet, cushy seats, ornate ceilings. Saturday double feature matinees at The Park were a staple of my childhood and a rite of passage for me, my older brother Ray and our friends. Throughout my life I’ve had many a magical experience at the movies, but none stands out as much as the one I had on a cold and grey winter afternoon in 1965.
The Sound Of Music was the big hit movie at the time so my mom took me and Ray to see a matinee screening at The Park. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, we were greatly anticipating the upcoming holiday and the first snow of winter that we hoped would precede it. I don’t recall much about the actual movie viewing experience that day but I’ll never forget what happened afterwards. When the film ended, we stepped from the darkened theater into the light of the afternoon and were amazed at what we saw; it had snowed while we were inside! It was slightly more that a dusting but just enough snow for everything to be blanketed in a thin layer of white. The magic of that moment and the magic of the movies are forever linked in my mind.
A year earlier, The Park was the scene of another seminal movie moment for me. Ray and I screamed and sang along with a couple hundred other kids while The Beatles frolicked their way through A Hard Days Night. We loved The Beatles so much and this was the closest we’d ever come to seeing them live. Our dad sat stoically beside us, not sure what all the fuss was about. I remember thinking at the time how cool it was that dad had taken us. Sadly, The Park Theater was destroyed by a fire in 1974. A bank now sits on the site.
The entire movie going experience is still magical to me. Entering the dimly lit theater, the low murmur of conversation, the anticipation of the feature film, the larger than life aspects of the giant screen and surround sound. Most people leave at the end of the film but I stay until the last credit rolls and the house lights go on. Some directors add little surprises during or after the credits and I never want to miss any of those. I’ve carried the love of the movies with me all my life right up to the present day.
Ever since the arrival of the VCR and video stores, movie attendance has been on a slow, steady decline. DVD’s came along and home movie viewing improved both in quality and ease of operation. The ubiquity of online streaming services has nearly rendered the movie theater obsolete. Why shell out $10 a head to go out and see a movie when you can now watch virtually any film ever made in the privacy of your own home?
The existential horrors of COVID-19 have forced movie screens across the country to go black, further accelerating their decline. Hopefully it will once again be safe to sit inside a theater and watch a film. When that day comes, I wonder if there will be any theaters left to go back into? What a devastating loss that would be, another shared experience with other human beings gone as our society becomes more and more insular.
I’ll leave you with this thought. If popcorn is popping in the lobby of some future movie theater and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
We were quite the flotilla. Six adults, three teenagers and two dogs heading out on paddle boards and kayaks for an afternoon on Sparks Lake near Bend, Oregon. This idyllic lake in the shadow of majestic Mount Bachelor is the perfect place to spend a lazy summer afternoon with family and friends.
Our first stop was a small sandy beach which we thankfully had to ourselves. Sandwiches, drinks and snacks came out as we relaxed deeper into this sunsplashed day. Our kids Sam and Denali had other plans. They immediately set off down the beach together to explore. With no Instagram or Snapchat to distract them they quickly segued into pre-smartphone mode. It didn’t take long for them to discover that the water nearest the shore was teeming with two inch long, olive green tadpoles. Denali came running over excitedly to show me one of these critters wriggling in her cupped hands. The adults munched, the dogs splashed happily in the lake and our kids were off on their own Discovery Channel adventure. Sam came up and cut the top off of an empty soda can while Denali dug a shallow hole a few feet from the water. The can was now a tadpole scooper and the hole their new home. The kids created a similar project two summers ago in Hawaii. While hiking a deserted beach on Kauai we came upon a creek filled with small black tadpoles. Our young wildlife biologists spent a couple of hours constructing a temporary home for those tadpoles too.
Watching Sam and Denali today I marvel at how effortlessly they can turn into little kids again, they’re sixteen going on six. That childhood sense of wonder is still inside of them, simmering just below the surface and it takes but one simple thing, like today’s tadpole discovery, to awaken it. The older our kids get the fewer and further between these spontaneous moments occur. However by getting them away from the trappings of civilization and technology there’s always a chance of them occurring again.
Kids reach a certain age, some sooner than others, and it’s suddenly not cool to be a kid any longer. Why does this happen? There seems to be an unwritten chronologic age at which childhood ends. However, I know plenty of adults who manage to retain that kid spirit, refusing to “grow up”. Kids are intuitive and sensitive and whip smart. Their wide-eyed “oh my god, look at this!” sense that everything is new and possibilities are unlimited is refreshing and magical to be around. To spend time with kids is to live in the moment, experiencing life to the fullest. I try every day to see the world through the eyes of a child and hang on to their unique sense of wonder.
On a recent camping trip I had the opportunity to spend some time with the four year old granddaughter of a friend. She and I walked along the rocky beach of a lake collecting bird feathers. I found one feather that was particularly beautiful. It was about half an inch wide and three inches long, light grey at the bottom, gradually giving way to a darker shade of grey. It abruptly changes into a band of pure white, terminating in a point of jet black. I asked my little friend Raya what kind of bird she thought this feather came from. She paused for a moment, opened up her dark rimmed blue eyes as wide as they could go and exclaimed, “A rainbow bird!”
May we all continue to see the rainbow birds of the world.