Field Trips and Movies

Six of us left the continuum care campus to go to a movie theater in a near-by mall. I hate getting into a car with another octogenarian at the wheel but my car isn’t big enough to take more than two pint sized people with me, especially if one them comes with a walker. This is nothing new, I used to hate getting into a car with a septuagenarian at the wheel, too, when I was in the Red Hat Society. That group of women was even scarier because we joked around more, were more of a distraction to anyone driving. But my fears were unjustified. We never got involved in an accident and our road trips were longer than any I’m bound to have in this my current chapter of my life. Still, it would help if I’d quit binge watching Grey’s Anatomy where ‘road kill’ comes into Seattle's trauma center and ends up on a surgical table where every other patient seems to die while the doctors sort out their love lives as they stand over their bloody bodies. I’m in season 12 of 18 so hopefully I’ll be to the end of the series before my trigger thumb/carpal tunnel surgery is scheduled. With my imagination I can see myself leaving our surgical center minus an arm because a flesh-eating bacteria entered my wounds. Okay, I just outed myself as a worry wort. Or did I do that a long ago?

Being a worry wort does have its upside. I credit that mindset for me never having let a bride down in my twenty years of servicing nearly 4,000 weddings and receptions with flowers. I always had a plan A and B with a follow up Plan C. For extra points for weddings I carried a tackle box with stuff like smelling salts, band-aids, shirt buttons and thread for hemming up dresses---this was in the days before wedding coordinators were a thing and they inherited the tackle boxes. I was prepared for every conceivable thing that could go wrong from the wholesalers shipping the wrong flowers to the church being locked when it was time to pick up the rentals after the wedding to move them to another church. I traveled that way too. Laugh at me if you must---my husband did---but if I was caught during a blizzard on a highway for ten hours I had my homemade coffee can stove for heat and for melting snow into drinking water. I could eat my emergency energy bars and do word puzzles while I waited to be rescued. You'd be surprised how much storm-comfort stuff you can pack inside a coffee can stove. I blame my mom for me always being prepared. She made the teen me carry dimes in my shoes in case I needed to make an emergency phone call.

Enough about me. The movie we saw was Where the Crawdads Sings and afterward we went to a restaurant where we disagreed on whether or not the leading character, Kya, actually killed the young man (Chase) who she stood trial for murdering and was acquitted. One thing we didn’t disagree on was that we all loved the movie. The scenery of the Carolina swamps and marshlands was fascinating, the acting and casting was spot on. I’d read the book but so long ago I had forgotten it and its plot. But here it is two weeks later after seeing the movie and I’m still thinking about it. 

Spoiler Alert: I found an article that explains the ending and the clues in the film that back up the case for her having done it and I was finally convinced by the line Kya spoke to her publisher about how she believed nature doesn’t have a dark side “just inventive ways to endure” coupled with a line she wrote in a diary her husband, Tate, found after she died about how Chase had become her pry. I wish this movie was on Netflix. It's the kind of film I’d watch over again back-to-back so I could enjoy the dialogue without the distraction of the cinematography. Since having Netflix I get frustrated watching stuff on regular TV where you can’t rewind the parts you want to savor, where you can’t pause the action long enough to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer.

Despite my fear of riding with senior citizen drivers, today---if you're reading this on the day it goes live---I am on another road trip. An all day trip with two car loads of women from my CCC. We’re visiting a gay couple who have a cottage on Lake Michigan who split their time between their cottage and the CCC. One lady in the couple is in my book club and our sense of humors meshed from the first time we met. We’re kindred spirits on the silliness charts. They were both college professors who taught graphic arts and are just plain fun to be around. There is another gay couple living here who are not as warm and fuzzy but who are quick to say they are pleasantly surprised at how well “they’ve been accepted” on this Christian based, non-profit campus. I don’t think they are as good at reading people as they think they are---and gayness has nothing to do with it. And I’ll just leave it at that. ©