Stu's visit to Egypt (year 2)
04/29/2003
I'm sitting in my living room in Cairo, Egypt. I just got home from work and am settling into a comfy chair with a makeshift dinner of noodles and vegetables. I turn on the TV, because I don't like to eat alone, and a movie is just about to start. It is Airplane!, the quintessential parody film about disaster movies of the 1970s. Immediately I think of my grandmother.
My grandmother doesn't have a particular interest in zany comedies and she doesn't resemble any of the characters in the film. Instead, I am reminded of her because this is the only movie I have ever seen in the theatre with her. (I can't specifically remember watching a TV movie with her either, but an hour of Matlock followed by an episode of Murder She Wrote must count for something.)
I was thirteen and she had recently retired and moved to our town. Now, instead of driving six hours to Detroit once a year, I could visit her anytime I wanted to ride my bike across town and mow her lawn. It didn't take much of a bribe. She paid me in cans of Chef-Boy-Are-Dee ravioli and cartons of Neapolitan ice cream. I would have mowed the lawn everyday if she wasn't perceptive enough to notice how fast grass grew.
One evening, my older sisters and my grandmother had decided to visit the cinema and I wanted to go with them. I don't remember the details, but I may have begged. Perhaps even thrown a tantrum, although it was not my style (my sisters had much more of a dramatic flair than I.) Or maybe they just felt sorry for me and let me tag along. Either way, it was a momentous occasion for me for several reasons. 1) I was going to a movie at night 2) I was going to a PG-rated movie with the guidance of people who were technically not my parents and 3) I saw bare breasts on a screen in the presence of my grandmother.
Airplane! made such an impression on me that, to this day, I can recite much of the dialogue and describe nearly every scene. If you ask my grandmother what she remembers she will tell you that the crowd laughed more at me laughing than they did at the film. Apparently, I absolutely guffawed my way through the entire performance. It is one of few films that has elicited tears in me.
It is nostalgic to sit here and think about the past. And it is only natural to think that old movies would spark those memories. After all, that's how memory works. Time is linear and moves only forward. Here I am sitting in Cairo, Egypt watching a movie that I saw with my grandmother twenty years ago in a theatre in Rochester, New York. It's kind of weird, but understandable.
What would be weirder is if you could have the same process work in reverse. What if, twenty years ago, I was sitting in the theatre watching the film for the first time, but I had a premonition of sitting in my apartment in Cairo twenty years later watching the same film. So, instead of saying, Oh yeah, I saw this twenty years ago with my grandmother. I would say something like, Oh yeah, I'll see this twenty years from now in Egypt with a bowl of pasta on my lap.
On the other hand, some premonitions would be more disturbing than others. Remember that Friends episode? The one where Joey and Phoebe fix each other up on blind dates and Joey forgets until the last minute and finds a random guy named Mike? What if you thought, Oh yeah, I'll see this episode in an adult care facility in Boca Ratan, Florida strapped in a wheel chair waiting for a pimple-faced-adolescent volunteer to wipe the drool off my chin. On second thought, scrap the whole idea. I'll stick to reflecting nostalgically and leave the sooth-saying to the soothsayers.