My real (and cranky) entry for today is here; this is a kind of short p.s. I was flipping channels just now (when K isn't home, I get to work the remote) and I came across the end of a movie called "Sentimental Journey." I looked it up; it was made in 1946, starring John Payne and Maureen O'Hara. I saw it when I was about 14 or 15, when it was on TV one afternoon. There used to be a daily afternoon movie that started at 4:00 or 4:30 and went until 6:00 when the news came on, back in the day before the news started at like 4:00.
In my house, dinner at 5:00 was sacred. My father got home from work by 4:55 and at 5:00 we ALL sat down to eat. There was no getting out of this. No "I'm not hungry" or "I don't feel like eating that." No wiggle room here. 4:30 to 5:00 was usually reserved for us helping Shirl get dinner on the table, too.
So I was watching this movie in the den, which was just downstairs from the kitchen (it was a split level). It must have been spring; I remember sunlight streaming in through the window which was high on the wall. It's a real weeper of a flick, about a woman who adopts a child and then dies and the husband doesn't want the child, etc., etc., etc. I was watching, I was loving it, I was a teary mess.
Just before five, Shirl called me for dinner and I answered incoherently, "I'm coming!" or something like that. When I didn't come -- I was maybe ten feet away from her -- she called again, more insistently, as mothers will do. Finally, she came angrily to the top of the stairs and demanded that I come up to eat.
I told her, as best I could, what I was watching. She paused a moment, and then told me to keep watching, that I could eat later.
She only did this one more time, that I can remember, when I was reading Gone With the Wind, and she let me keep on reading -- and crying -- instead of coming to the table.
Ah, she loved a good weeper, did Shirl. It was a very cool thing that she did, for a fifties/sixties mom. I knew it then, too. Very cool.
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I'm watching channel flipping
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