Movies For My Days of Judgment

There is random collection of movies at the Portland Library in Portland, Maine. Everything from the DW Cooper’s silent films, to Garbo’s first talkies, to Criterion and Janus movie classics, to Woody Allen favorites have found a home there. No one is curating the collection since some disc cases are torn and a few of the movies are in too bad condition to watch.  Still, I recognize the titles; they are pieces of my past, reminders of people I knew and/or places I can’t forget, hints at my future, and signs of aspirations and dreams. The first time I glanced at the collection I froze trying to understand their meaning, how particular titles gathered and collected as if solely for my viewing pleasure.  I had to return several times and stare at them to get message.

Let me just add that I love movies.  Ever since I watched Streep and Redford fall in at the foot of the Ngong Hills in “Out of Africa,” I was hooked. It was the same movie, I watched repeatedly when I fell in love, in a quiet unrequited desperate way, with a man who was not my husband; it was also the movie I watched – and bawled over – the day I got divorced.  Incidentally, that movie is in the Portland collection. And so is Woody’s Allen’s "Hannah and Her Sisters," a movie that every year marks the start of my Christmas holiday. Then there is Wong Kar Wei’s "2046," one of my favorite love stories on film. I discovered Kar Wei after my divorce and after yet another bad date, and his film on unrequired desire, lovers, robots and speedy trains like moving cities reminded me that love was a mystery regardless of how I felt about it at the moment.  Bogart’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” was my college professor’s favorite film and he was was first the man who believed in my writing. Bertolucci's "Sheltering Sky," opened up a world of erotic and sensual wonders, bigger than me and outside the limitations of whatever was good or bad in my sex life at the time.  "The Lover" taught me that a tender moment could stay with me forever, even if it was only on screen.  Then, there were the films with my favorite seductresses, Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker, Lola Montez, etc., women I aspired to emulate. Some of the films,  the likes of Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut, were once important to me, but I never finished watching them for the millions of things I had to do when I got divorced and was working three jobs and raising two kids on my own. Now, I watch these movies in their entirety because I have time, because I am between lives, because I am starting again without lovers, husbands, boyfriends and no more kids to raise.  I am almost like new.

The other day, a man came by the movie stack and as he grabbed a copy of the “Lion King” he chuckled and said to me he was catching up.  “And so am I,” I thought. These are my days of judgment, a rare moment in between chapters of my life where I get to reflect, process, understand, make up for lost time, forgive, forget and release the past in hopes of starting anew. 

I felt like this once before when I traveled alone to Bali. At the time, I was years into a difficult divorce. I understood some of the mystery of own my life-because in Bali time stood still and I was completely at ease, so at ease, in fact, I could not feel my pulse-and that only the essential remains. It was on that trip that day after day I listened to Louie's Armstrong's "Life Is a Cabaret" and Polyphonic music (the only two choices in the hotel music library), lounged on the balcony swing that faced the wild bamboo and oak trees of a forest outside my room, and ate exotic fruits of mangosteen, durian, salak left in a beautiful bowl  on my porch every morning. I realized then that my brutal divorce was over and that at one point in my marriage I had loved, been loved, and that always remained.  After that epiphany, my life started anew. Lucky for me this time my beloved films have joined me for my days of judgment. Memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at http://www.amazon.com   

Ruby

," available at: http://www.amazon.com