Thanks For the Memories… NOT!

In past blogs I’ve written of fond random thoughts from the past. Today I’d like to address another side of the past—how it changes form in the present. While avoiding writing this morning, I had TMC (Turner Classic Movies) on TV. For the past few weeks they’ve been showing films nominated for Academy Awards, so the offerings are pretty darn good. Today I decided to watch a film I’d seen before and remembered as being good. (I half-watched because I was also whomping up on my computer in a mean game of Solitaire. No box of nuts and bolts is going to outdo ME when it comes to games. Not more than 80% of the time, anyway.)

Back to the film. It occurred to me that I’d liked this movie—Midnight Lace—when I saw it before. What’s not to like? Doris Day, Rex Harrison, and hunky John Gavin. The premise of this one is, rich Doris is married to rich Rex Harrison. They move to London, and immediately Doris starts receiving threatening phone calls. The caller says he’s going to kill her by the end of the month. We (the viewers) never hear the caller say that, but Doris being Doris, who could doubt her? Who? Everyone in the movie it seems, except hunky John, who eventually comes to the rescue when it turns out she’s not looney tunes.

I have to confess something. I’m one of ten people in the world who isn’t ashamed to say I really liked Doris Day movies. But today … today I have to admit I was on the would-be killer’s side. In fact, Doris moaned and groaned and pissed and cried so much, I was practically begging the killer to come and get her. “She’s in the bedroom!” I shouted to the TV screen. I was so incensed, I missed black-eight-on-red-nine and lost the Solitaire game I was playing at the time.

So, Midnight Lace. Once liked, now, well if I could type a Bronx cheer, I would. This run-in with Doris led me to think of other things that have changed with age and perspective. For instance, my grandmother’s house in Iowa, which I remember as being very large, was really pretty tiny when hubby and I visited as adults. I tried reading Gone With the Wind many years after first falling in love with it and couldn’t get beyond the first couple of chapters. It seemed kind of silly, and I found myself wishing it was more, I don’t know … erotic, maybe. I've been spoiled. And who hasn’t run into an old girlfriend or boyfriend and wondered what in the world attracted us to that person?

There are a few positive things in my theory. I like Brussels sprouts and asparagus now, neither of which thrilled me during those years I thought my grandmother’s house was so big. And I look at AGE very differently. I not only don’t think people over 30 have an obligation to drag themselves off somewhere and stop being a bother, I’ve come to look on 60 as being quite sprightly.

An exception to my new theory is in music. The same inane lyrics I loved as a kid, I love today. I mean, they just don’t write songs like Wooly Bully anymore. Thank God.

What are some of the things you look on differently now than you did a few years ago? Life, marriage, clothing, books? With age comes wisdom, they say. I can’t vouch for that, but I do know that with age comes at least one new way of looking at the same old things. Share, please!

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Thanks for joining me, even though I had no nude photos, like yesterday's blogger :)—

Dee
www.deesknight.com