Winter Memories: Nostalgia or Analogy?

Covered bridge in Fairfax, VT near our house  (NMP)

Is it the curse of old men to dwell on the past? This winter has been so cold and snowy that it reminds me of when winter excited me. The 1970s were distressful: stagflation, gas shortages, high unemployment, appalling fashion and music, and inability to land a teaching job. Emily and I desperately wanted to leave Pennsylvania.

Lots of people like Pennsylvania, but it was too conservative, plus about all this working-class lad knew about the world was nearby Maryland, West Virginia, and Washington, DC. I got married in 1978; Emily and I wanted to live in New England, she because of relatives in the region and me because I was seduced by photos in National Geographic. Those are not the best reasons for pulling up stakes, but we vowed to move to move whenever one of us got a job up north. It happened eight months later. We’ve traveled a lot since then, but we always head back to our adopted homeland of New England.

We now reside in Massachusetts, but our first New England home was in northwestern Vermont where Emily got a job offer. That’s world-class irony, as Vermont and Rhode Island were the only New England states where none of Emily’s relatives lived. The only time either of us had ever seen Vermont was when we were driving to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, got turned around in its notorious traffic rotary, and accidentally drove across the border to Pownal, Vermont. It did not leave a good impression. Pownal was rundown and sported a tawdry greyhound betting track. Its parking lot was where we reversed direction and hightailed it back to Williamstown.

We moved to northwestern Vermont in early winter, before I drove back to Pennsylvania to finish my Masters degree courses. On my return trip, I stopped in Montpelier for a job interview. It was so cold I couldn’t feel my feet!  After all, I was armed with acrylic sweaters, light jackets, thin socks, and ankle-high footwear. I didn’t get that job, thus I was unemployed and, like many newlyweds, cash was tight. Burlington was out of our price range, so we rented a basement apartment in Milton, nearly 20 miles north. We froze our tushes off, but were sustained by the adrenaline of discovery before discovering wool, down parkas, tire chains, engine block heaters, and the wisdom of throwing a snow shovel in the trunk. 

 

We were once among the idiots walking across Button Bay! (NMP)

 

Somehow, it felt romantic to bundle up, dare to walk upon frozen Lake Champlain, hear the snow make a noise under our feet that was a cross between a crunch and a squeak, and watch the thermometer plunge below zero Fahrenheit. I took to calling Vermont “The Land of Right-Angle Smoke.” There were several weeks in which one degree would have constituted a thaw. The air was so heavy and laden with ice crystals that warmed air could not rise through it. River valleys were filled with homes where woodsmoke climbed 25-30 feet above the roofline, smacked into the cold air mass, and made an L-shaped turn. It couldn’t have been healthy to breathe that air, but I didn’t think about it back then.

I finally secured a teaching job, in Milton no less. The community was poor, but I adored teaching in the grades 7-12 high school. When I left after seven years, it had zilch to do with the kids. Oh, sure, I had occasional discipline problems, but nothing I couldn’t handle and I deeply empathized with those growing up without the resources that ought to be guaranteed every youngster. In a literal sense, Emily and I grew up in Vermont. Small wonder it holds a special place in our hearts and we seldom turn down a chance to venture across the border (near Brattleboro) and keep going until we make it to Burlington or beyond. 

Snow falling 1" per hour in our MA backyard

 

Maybe I’m remembering all this because right now, winter in Massachusetts feels like one in Vermont. We’ve had several large snowstorms that crunch-squeak beneath our now-appropriate footwear and numerous subzero nights. Is it geezer nostalgia? I’d plead guilty to miss being in my 20s when the cold didn’t make my joints throb or send me under a mountain of quilts. Maybe. Ask me again about nostalgia in June, when Vermont skies are blue, days are pleasantly warm, farmers’ markets are crowded, and small boats flash brightly-colored sails on Lake Champlain.

Rob Weir

NMP = Not My Photo. There were no consumer digital cameras until the 1990s.

 

Lisa Jackson's Older Novel Skewers Celebrity Culture

 

 

 

EXPECTING TO DIE (2017)

By Lisa Jackson

473 pages

★★★★

 

To paraphrase John Kerry, who among us does not love Big Foot? In Grizzly Falls, Montana, that would be detectives Regan Pescoli and Selena Alvarez. The rest of the town is either scared out of their wits, believers, or boosters who hear the tourism cash register ringing when Big Foot emerges as the prime suspect in a series of crimes. Pescoli and her now-husband Santana think Big Foot is superstitious nonsense. Regan (literally) lacks the time to take Big Foot seriously. She is closing in on 40 and her ballooning belly is lampooned by town busybodies who think her advanced age for motherhood is embarrassing. No wonder Pescoli wears her raging hormones on her badged sleeve. Selena is a rationalist who doesn’t welcome upheaval because she’s next in charge when her boss goes on maternity leave, though Reagan is determined to restore order before checking into the birthing room.

 

It’s personal, as Regan’s teenaged daughter Bianca from her previous marriage was allegedly chased by Big Foot. It’s bad enough that Destiny, one of Bianca’s classmates, is missing but Bianca and a bunch of her high school classmates returned to the forbidden area where Destiny was last seen to “hang out” (read drinking, smoking pot, making out, and scaring each other).  As Bianca is navigating her way out of the woods, she hears movement and senses she’s being stalked. A rattlesnake? A grizzly bear? A cougar? All could be found in the mountains of West Montana. Imagine Bianca’s terror when she glimpses a hairy creature over seven feet tall that smells like a garbage dump. My guess is that you, like Bianca, wouldn’t stick around to get a closer look. She tears off through the forest, stumbles, gets up, runs, and keeps going until she mangles her ankle, tumbles into a small creek, and onto Destiny’s putrefying body. Despite the pain, Bianca screams and speeds back to a parking lot filled with cop cars and reports her find, despite the plea of some of her peers to keep quiet. Not happening; her mom is a cop after all, even if she is embarrassed by her mom.

 

Regan retains her doubts about Big Foot, but somebody or something has killed Destiny. Now imagine being a teen again. Not much happens in Grizzly Falls, but Bianca’s peer group is pretty much like those elsewhere, a volatile mix of recent grads who didn’t go to college, good kids, dare devils, preening beauty queens, scholars, idiots, and entitled jerks and jocks with parents who are even worse. You’d think, though, that young folks would finally avoid venturing out of town, but you’d be wrong. Some of the boys want to act like they’re not scared, and adrenaline, peer pressure, and a taste of freedom are powerful lures. It’s just a matter of time until another kid goes missing and another attack takes place. The local Big Foot Believers club is ready to lock, load, and go hunting. In other words, Grizzly Falls is facing mass hysteria. Can it get any worse?

 

Yep, all that’s needed is hucksterism, an aggressive journalist, and Pescoli’s slacker ex-husband Luke and his much younger second wife. Luke is happy to exploit his biological daughter (Bianca) in pursuit of easy money and a brush with fame. Welcome to the age of greed and “reality” TV. Barclay Spinx is the “host” of a show that “exposes” mysteries. He wants to restage Bianca’s flight for Big Foot Territory! Montana and his TV crew descend on Grizzly Falls like a plague of locusts. Soon, everybody is town including the mayor is anxious to be interviewed, be on TV, or explain why their daughter would be more telegenic than Bianca. The fact that that Regan and Santana want nothing to do with such a sleazy project serves only to encourage erstwhile usurpers to crawl out the woodwork. Meanwhile, Pescoli and Alvarez have several additional murders and missing persons investigations to solve.

 

Is Big Foot discovered? You’ll have to discover that for yourself, just as you’ll have to judge the plausibility of author Lisa Jackson’s mystery. IMHO, Jackson absolutely nails the cult of celebrity, the tawdry aspects of smalltown life, hormone-poisoned teenage boys, jealousy-inflamed girls and young women, and how “reality” can be warped. Think Mark Twain’s “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” for the age of television. Expecting to Die is an incisive indictment of American culture.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Sliding Doors a Look at the Butterfly Effect

 

 

 

SLIDING DOORS (1998)

Directed by Peter Howitt

Miramax, 99 minutes, PG-13 (adult situations)

★★★

 

Movie themes often run in cycles. In 1981, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made Blind Chance, a film about the famed butterfly theory. It holds that changing the smallest thing from the past, even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, could alter the future significantly. My favorite butterfly effect movie is Run, Lola, Run (1998). It was part of a mini-trend of similarly themed films: Me, Myself, I (1999), Happenstance (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), Mr. Nobody (2009) …. Some, like Donnie Darko, confused audiences; others ranged from intriguing to middling.

 

Place Sliding Doors in that last category, which is better than its official designation as a Rom-Com. It’s only a romantic comedy in one of its two timelines; one would be better labeled a tragedy. Its focal point is Helen Quilley (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has been fired by her public relations firm in London. On the elevator she drops an earring, which is picked up and returned by a stranger. She heads for the Tube, and misses her train by a split second. These things alone qualify as a bad day on its own, but she returns to her London apartment to find her slacker boyfriend Gerry Flannigan (John Lynch) climaxing with Lydia (Jeanne Triplehorn), his ex-American girlfriend. Helen walks out.

 

In a rewind, Helen makes the train and finds herself in conversation with James Hammersmith (John Hannah), the stranger who picked up her earring on the elevator. Helen finds James funny, daft, and kind. On her trip home she is mugged, allowing Gerry to dodge discovery by minutes, though he leaves clues requiring awkward movements to conceal. By then, we already hate Gerry as a lazy sponge who is being kept by Helen while he’s not writing the book that is supposed to assure their financial futures.

 

In each scenario, Helen ends up seeing through Gerry’s shallow veneer and staying with her best friend Anna (Zara Turner) as she tries to sort out her life. To help keep the timelines straight, script writer/director Peter Hewitt has one Helen coifed in long, straight hair and looking classically “cute.” In the alt-timeline Anna convinces Helen to move on from Gerry. Helen marks the shift by getting her hair cut short in a stylish manner and assumes an air of glamor, despite being exhaustive from working several jobs. In each timeline, Helen comes to prefer James, while Gerry pours out his tribulations to his mate Russell (Douglas McFerren). As opposed to Anna’s sympathy for Helen, Russell laughs hysterically at Gerry and tells him what an idiot he is. In each timeline, Helen discovers she’s pregnant, but in one Gerry’s the father and the other it’s James. (Even Lydia gets into the act!)

 

Things happen that disrupt rom-com formulae. Neither Helen will deliver a baby. In one she falls down stairs and miscarries; in another she is struck by a van. Whatever her fate, though–even one in which she thinks James has been playing her for a fool–it is James who is steadfast in a good way, not the obsequious Gerry.

 

As in most butterfly effect tales, viewers need to be alert; hairstyles alone won’t tip off essential details less obvious than Helen never should have been in a relationship with Gerry in the first place. The title Sliding Doors is clever in its dual meaning–the subway door opening or failure to do so is our metaphorical “butterfly”–but it also references the way the film cuts between the two Helens and, less obviously, the way James’ mind slides between light-hearted and serious. Although Sliding Doors is not likely to be thought of as a significant film, Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good in it. Because of her career in fashion and her parentage (actress Blythe Danner and director/producer Bruce Paltrow) we expect her to do sophistication well, but she was also convincing as a more earthy and naïve young professional. In addition, her English accent is very convincing. John Hanna is amusing, but would have been more endearing with his manic side tempered a bit. John Lynch is supposed to disgust us and does, though he too could have dialed it back to help us understand why Helen was so blind to his quintessential jerkiness. For me Zara Turner struck the right balance between comedy and seriousness.

 

Sliding Doors is no Run, Lola, Run, but it’s diverting.

 

Rob Weir