Been off line

I have been off line for a few days. Traveling is sometimes like that. We are in Jefferson Iowa. Big Brooker family reunion this week end. It will be fun seeing many people we have not seen for ages. Then we will be in Iowa for the next couple of months. We are on a quest. We plan to look for a small piece of property near the bike trail and near Jefferson/Cooper Iowa. We do not know at this time if it will all work out but we are going to look into it. Our plans are to have 2 to 4 RV hook ups so our RVing friends can come visit us and join us in the fun stuff like biking and golfing or perhaps just visiting.
I read the article below and enjoyed it very much. Butch and I are Netflix members and we too enjoy the movies we can see both old and new. When I hear of a movie we might like to see I add it to our queue and we know we will see it sooner or later.
Enjoy this little stroll down memory lane!
AT THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

By Walter Mills


At the Movies

This has been the summer of Netflix, of old movies delivered by mail two
or three times a week. This is like being set loose in the candy store,
like summer nights at the Breezeway drive-in theater with the car
windows down and a pillow to curl up on when I was four years old, the
big screen seen through a shimmer of heat haze.

This is like the old movie house on Krome Avenue in downtown Homestead
with the “We Are Air-Conditioned” sign on the door, a rarity in South
Florida in the 1950s. I saw my first sit-down movie there, in the cool,
something with alien creatures with large brainy heads. I’ll try to
track it down again this summer.

After movies downtown, we could walk past the barbershop where I got my
hair cut and get a soda at the open air cigarette and magazine store
that had no front wall, only a metal gate they closed at night. Coming
into town with a quarter in my pocket on a Friday night with my family,
strolling down the avenue past the drugstore with its big lighted
windows, past the Western Auto store, looking in with longing at the big
rubber tired bicycles hanging on racks and the wall of baseball gloves,
then seeing a movie and afterward eating a purple snow cone at the
cigarette shop up the street, well, I could walk on that street forever
and never be bored. Who needs Broadway? Who needs Manhattan?

This summer is like walking home in the Texas twilight with my older
brother and sister after seeing “Mr. Sardonicus,” a horror movie from
the late fifties, and being terrified by my brother twisting his face
into the horrible mask of Sardonicus to scare me. I’ll leave that off
my movie list.

And it is like going to the 10-cent movie on the naval base in
Millington, Tennessee, with my whole family to see the musical “Li’l
Abner” based on the characters I studied every Sunday morning on the
comic pages. After the movie we took paper sacks to the grove of pecan
trees near the theater and filled them with the windfall pecans. To
this day I associate pecans with autumn in Tennessee and the lost comics
of childhood.

I remember all the theaters: from the rundown movie houses with sticky
floors showing Saturday matinees to teenagers in Key West, Florida, to
the glorious Castro theater with its Mighty Wurlitzer organ rising up
out of the stage in San Francisco. I especially remember the weekend
shows at the Naro Theater on Colley Avenue in the old part of Norfolk,
Virginia, the great double bills, and the restaurants on the avenue open
late and music in the cafès.

This summer is like coming out of the movie house after hours of
darkness on a Saturday afternoon when you are twelve and being surprised
that there is still daylight. It is disorienting like that and a little
self-indulgent, like too many trips to the candy counter, and it is
good, like summer nights at the drive-in theater with your parents when
you were four.




(The above column originally appeared in the Centre Daily Times and is
copyright © 2009 by Walter Mills. All rights reserved worldwide. To
contact Walt, address your emails to awmills@verizon.net ).
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