Living at the Movies…

When I was young, probably around 8 or 9 I suppose, the Gilliand family often went to the Saturday matinee movies in Newark, OH.  I don’t think we went every Saturday, but I’m certain we went more often than we attended our Presbyterian Church in Utica on Sundays.  The movies were a singular, magical experience for me.  The heavy, velvety smell of popcorn, the muffled scratch of my sneakers shuffling toward the right hall, (there were only 4 screens, BTW), the chill of the air that raised the hair on my arms and heightened an anticipation I could barely contain…all of these live in me, as clearly as if I were there today.

And when the house lights came down, I was transported to other places and times.  I’m not sure if everyone experiences cinema in this way, but the great span of the screen in the darkness and the envelope of sound isolates me on an island of experience.  I’m alone in another world. I love being in that place.

Back then, in the late 70’s, I hadn’t realized, yet, how small my real world was, but I think those Saturday morning matinees were the first time the veil was drawn back a little. I caught peeks and a fever to explore.

Not long after, I discovered that there was a similar experience to be found inside a book.  So many worlds to explore, both real and imagined.  I think I lived in Narnia first and then I moved to Middle-Earth. It wasn’t exactly the same as the cinema, of course, but the core of the experience is there; I am absent from the real world but completely alive in the fiction.  The very best books twist me into knots.  I experience them so completely that my emotions run unchecked.  I laugh, I cry, I fear, I celebrate, I want to run away, but, through heroic effort, I stay to the end.

Books make me a better person by allowing me to live, again and again, heroic lives, tragic lives, eclectic lives, humorous lives, broken lives, rescued lives….other lives.  Each of those lives has become part of mine.  That’s pretty awesome.

There are other paths, I’ve discovered, that will lead me into other worlds.  

Music can do it, occasionally…moreso when I was younger, I think.  It seems the conditions have to be just right for music to take me to other worlds.  Fast cars, summer nights, and back roads seem to help.  There are more factors working against music, but it still happens.

In Florence, once, a statue named David escorted me to the Renaissance.  In Paris, the fabric of “The Winged Victory,” wrapped itself around me for a time and we flew to Greece.  At the Vatican, Mary and I wept together the first time I beheld The Pieta.  A brick in the Coliseum whispered the 2000 year old story of a Roman craftsman.

These were all brief trips to other places, but at their core, they are the same experience.

I’m taking my son, Mikey, to see Spiderman tomorrow. I’m feeling a familiar kind of giddy.  I’m so excited to get to be Peter Parker again…I think he is too.