Holiday Plans and the Movie Wonder

I’d been wanting to call my youngest niece for over a week but I was afraid she’d think I was fishing for an invitation to come out for Thanksgiving. We talk on the phone every so often and we were overdue for a conversation. I knew she’s been busy helping her husband shrink-wrap boats after doing a her regular full time job and also helping out her daughter-in-law who is recovering from surgery, so I wasn’t concerned that I hadn’t heard from my niece.

In the meantime one of my niece-in-law’s pressured me into going to her Mary Kay party this past weekend even though I told her I don’t wear makeup anymore. But you know how those parties work, sometimes you end up buying when you don't want to because family is involved. I spent $50 on a face mask product and a sun screen. It didn’t help that I’ve become obsessed with my aging skin since I dug out a photo of me taken in 1967 and I had concrete proof that a century of living has not been kind to my once beautiful complexion. Boo woo, a close up photo of my skin would be hard to tell from a moonscape! But I am not obsessing enough to buy the Mary Kay $315 Awesome Advanced Age-Fighting Regimen Kit. My life-expectancy is too short to spend all that time and money cleaning, repairing, lifting, creaming and moisturizing my face with the contents of those eight tubes and jars.

 When my niece-in-law asked me what I’m doing for Thanksgiving I said, “I’m making turkey soup.” Why did I have to give her an honest answer?“Come over here!” she replied. “We’ll have lots of food.” I gave her a non-committal answer something like if you don’t hear from me by Tuesday, I’m not coming. I knew when I said it, I wasn’t going. I’m not fond of being around one of her grandsons.

After I got home from the Mary Kay party, right on queue my niece called and said she’d been so busy she forgot to call and she wanted me to come out to her house for Thanksgiving. Yeah! “…over the river and through the woods. Now Grandma’s cap I spy. Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done? Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!” I have fond memories of singing that song as Don and I would drive down the dirt road to my mom and dad’s cottage out in the boondocks. Between that house and my brother’s near-by my nieces and nephew have been a part of my Thanksgivings for thirty-five years.

Change of topic: The movie Wonder, based on a novel by the same name and starring Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson and Jacob Tremblay was a fantastic, feel good piece of inspirational writing paired with perfect casting. Jacob plays a ten year old boy---Auggie---who had been home schooled because of a facial distortion called “craniofacial difference” a birth anomaly in his DNA and the movie starts with him going to his very first day of regular school, in the 5^th grade and it follows him through that first year of him and his classmates learning to accept each other. A subplot involving his older sister and her friends added a layer of teen drama that also turned into the warm, fuzzes by the end of the film.

I went into the movie believing it was based on a true story but when I googled it later I learned it wasn’t. The story grew out of an incident where the author, R.J. Palacio, was in an ice cream shop with her family when the facial deformities of a girl at the next table caused her own child to start crying. She said she acted badly and rushed her kids out, missing a teachable moment instead of setting a good example to her kids about acceptance. That night she started writing the book with the basic theme of choosing kindness. I love how the story was told from several viewpoints: Auggie’s parents, his older sister, the bullies, the do-gooders and the best friends he developed at school. I cried once, when the dog died---oops, I guess it’s too late to issue a spoiler alert---but all of Gathering Girls I saw the movie with were dapping our eyes at one point or another. Mostly happy tears.

This would be the perfect movie to take a grandchild of any age to over the holidays. We all left the theater in an uplifted and happy mood, knowing it portrayed the world the way it should and could be if we all took the challenge one of Auggie’s teacher gave his students: "When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind." If you think that line looks familiar, the author borrowed the it from inspirational speaker, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer but her Wonder book elevated it into the ‘Choose Kind Movement’ in classrooms across America. A perfect message to be reminded of over the holidays. ©