Film

In another life and time I would have loved to have majored in film study. I have been in love with films since I was 6 years old and taken to my first at the Savoy Cinema in Cork to see Cinderella. The night enchanted me. Thehuge organ at intermission coming out of the floor with the words of the songs printed on the screen, the extra B films, the newsreels,  the icecream brought around in those little tubs with the wooden spoon, the upper balcony, the lower balcony. The magnificence of it all. Spellbound didn't cover it.

One of the huge bonuses of my childhood was spending a chunk of the summer with my favourite aunt in the small town where I was born. Her husband owned the town cinema. I remember the serials on Saturday and the rapid turnover of various films during the couple of weeks I stayed there. I feasted on the likes of Roy Rogers and other films which were sanitized  censored by the RCs who influenced the government and their righteous puritan hypocritcal hellhole  Office of the Censor. I only got to see complete films when I moved to Canada including, if you can believe it, Hamlet with Lawrence Olivier and the unintelligible Gigi (huge swathes of film-ribbon on the floor in that one) so the plot hadn't made sense and finally did.

I've been in love with film for ever. I would mitch off school on a Wednesday afternoon and scrape enough money to go to the foreign film cinema and feast on German, Italian and French films (all cut by said Office). And of course the American blockbusters, short on nuance but loud on effects and Big Screen theatrics.

I had a collection of thousands upon thousands of films, many taped by me especially from TVO, an Ontario station that featured fabulous films on Saturday Night at the Movies along with serious interviews with the cast and directors. Downsizing, I had to let go of this massive collection (indexed and documented to boot - ADD much?)

I saved some of my favourites. But not many.

I recently discovered Criterion which has about 1000 old films in stock for streaming and am positively thrilled to bits. It continuously changes what's available and for me, this is a gift out of the blue. Around $8 a month to subscribe. Many are the foreign films from my teenage life at that tiny foreign film cinema in Cork which opened up so much of the world to me.

I try and see all the Oscar winners every year. Still. And I post irregularly on IMDB and have since 1999(ye gads, 24 years!)

Here's the link to that: Wisewebwoman - Movies

My favourite film of all time? The Dead

But there are so many close that I can't possibly list them all.

But a recent one comes to mind (pardon my Irish bias)

The Quiet Girl

But there are so very many incredible films. Many of them made in the forties and sixties but so many made today also.

Bless you, Criterion.

And your favourite film?

A Girl In Ireland

There are all kinds of forces in our childhoods that form us as adults. I was forged in an Ireland that today sounds like the Taliban. Men and women were separated in all kinds of ways starting with church.

A mantilla

In my time - late forties early fifties in the last century - men and women sat on opposite aisles of the church. As soon as a girl hit puberty her head had to be covered in a mantilla in church. I was one who always asked why and the answer was that a women's hair could tempt a man. We had to be vigilant about throwing any temptation in a man's way as they quickly "went out of control."

Education was an awful waste for a woman as she would throw it all away when she got married, which was the end goal.

And speaking of end goals: There were 3 options for a girl's life:

(1) Become a nun (highest calling, a girl would be the bride of Christ. Chirst was obviously a polygamist but saying that was blasphemy of the highest order - hell fire and damnation were yours.

(2) Married, giving god all the children she possibly could and even more, if one of her sons was a priest she could go sit on the right hand side of god once she died (usually early being worn out from constant pregnancies.)

(3) Staying single but dedicating one's life to (free) community work in the church and supporting the clergy's housekeeping, etc.

Careers for women were frowned upon severely as
(1)If it was outside the norm (teacher, nurse) it could be offputting for a man who might be interested in you.
(2)You refrained from buying a car as you might as well say goodbye to any good man finding and marrying you.
(3)Keeping your intelligence to yourself, men find "smart" women saucy and forward. "Intelligence," said my father, the youngest of the family of six - all girls until his precious self, "Is always wasted on a girl."

Sex education was strict.

(1) Tampons would "destrioy" you. Why? No man would want you. Why? Tampons destroyed his pleasure.
(2) Never let a man touch you below the neck or above the knee - see "out of control" section from church rules.

From the beginning I saw that I was more of a worry than my four brothers. For I could "fall" pregnant. By any stray man. I remember living in fear of toilet seats if a man had used it prior to me. I could "catch" a stray pregnancy. And I was told about these dark and smelly places where girls who fell were incarcerated scrubbing sheets for the rest of their lives with their hands covered in chilblains and carbolic soap, dawn to dusk, living on bread and water and beaten by the nuns if they complained.

I remember looking at my brothers and thinking they have absolutely no idea how much freedom they have. None. The most they were told was not to climb into cars with strange men offering them sweeties. They didn't have to fear endless laundry work and were free to spray any female with an "unwanted" pregnancy and walk away.

the most imporant rule of all: I had to avoid these lurking pregnancies as I could wind up with carbolic hands in a dark damp dungeon for the rest of my born days.
To be continued.

Fallacies

I was raised with a lot of them as I'm sure many of you out there were too. Here are a few, feel free to add more:

Blood is thicker than water.

Never air your dirty linen in public.

When this life is hard you'll get your reward in the next.

Your friends were too good for this earth so God took them for playmates.

You can always count on your family.

Getting a pensionable job is the most important thing you'll ever do for yourself.

There's no money in being a writer/artist.

To serve is the best aspiration for a woman.

Offer it up and don't talk about it.

Never wear your heart on your sleeve.

Life in Ireland is the best life on earth.

Sparing the rod is spoiling the child.

You can get pregnant off a toilet seat.

Fallacies. All of them.

Reflection on a Friendship.

......My BFF is on the right.....


I was writing a birthday card to my oldest friend today. How old of a friendship, you might ask?

65 years of friendship.

I reviewed our history in the card. I always use blank cards. Unless they're my own. My own have a poem at the back, but the insides are white and inviting.

Our baby years. Our national school years. Our high school/teenage years. Our performing years. Our ugly first jobs. Our incredible party years. Our travelling years. Our weddings. Our babies. Their weddings and partnerships. Our grandparent years. It's neat this grandparent stuff. Her granddaughter sends me a painting from Australia. My granddaughter stays with her in Dublin for a few days this past month.

I can overlook these joys of long term devotion and loyalty if I'm not careful.

I outlined them all in my card to her.

We love reminding each other of our mothers. They each died when we were far too young to let them go. We adored each other's mothers. First thing she did when she had her first daughter was to go visit my mum. I was emigrated by then. My mother wrote me of it. How it brought me closer to her on a bad day (she was not doing too well with her cancer at the time).

Her mother would spoil me. Bring me breakfast in bed when I stayed there as my own home was far too busy for such indulgences being packed with siblings. My friend was an only child. I nearly had to be pried out of her house with a crowbar when I stayed.

We'd exchange clothes all the time, we even traded boyfriends. We bolstered each other through thick and thin. I don't think we ever had an angry word to say to each other. And we were never jealous of each other. Our talents and personalities are quite, quite different.

I doubt there are any secrets we withhold, I know I don't with her.

And we always write the language of the heart to each other in our daily emails.

And when we sit down with each other in Dublin or Cork, the years melt away and we just pick up the threads of conversation as if we'd met for breakfast that morning.

Everyone should be so lucky.

Not Black and White

The restorative qualities of my sunsets.

Swimming in the sea of old wounds and enragements is not doing me any good. I was planning on getting very much into my own personal sea of RC harm on subsequent posts but it seems like that particular muse has fled and I have no irresistible urge to lay it all down on paper. I wrote a couple of notes and found that the subsequent apoplexy was simply not my colour at all.

Lay the ghosts. Become a kinder gentler me. No, impossible, scratch that last.

Daughter and I had a chat yesterday on old wounds, on how we are all wounded to some degree. How we carry those wounds being all important. Should we keep peeling those scabs off? Thing is, we decided, patterns in families repeat and repeat. Ad nauseum.

Certainly in mine. Much as I'd like it all to stop now, please. Let's be friends. Let's enlighten ourselves as to what is really happening. What truly lies beneath, as some wise old pundit had it. But enlightenment doesn't happen to all at once, does it. I sometimes think I'm some kind of Pollyanna, trying to make it all better. Kiss the boo-boos.

Thing is, again, that there are some who desperately need those boo-boos.

They need to keep tending them and tending them like a really bad abscess. So they don't have
to look at the root causes. Ever.

I'm finished with this particular topic for now.

Bloodied but unbowed, that's me.

And on the 8th Day...

This is a photo that Daughter took up at the Tigeen the other day, the bay reflected on the French doors. I love it.

This is the 8th day of a cold I suspected was sourced somewhere in Ontario and gifted to me by Daughter who returned from there.

I was doing fine with it, relieved it hadn't turned into a bronchial nightmare like times past. I had poor lungs as a child, double pneumonia and pleurisy by the age of 10 and heat treatments in the hospital for about a year afterwards. I can still smell that machine, odd that, and I can't find any information on it on a Google search. It was a night out for my mother and me. Every Wednesday night. And we would walk from the hospital to a distant bus-stop afterwards as the fare was cheaper. Today, I can't imagine my father coping alone with the children at home, the youngest about a year old.

It's funny how one can think of something far off in the past and it opens up a floodgate of memories. My mother would always buy me a chocolate bar afterwards - I would take forever to choose it in the newsagent's across from the hospital - for being a "good girl" and lying so still on my stomach under the lamps. I imagine my lungs were being dried. I must have been a wheezy child but I have no recollection of that.

And here I am today, 8 days into this nasty bug and feeling worse than the last 7 days. I slept most of the day, coughed and hacked so much I got a rare headache and yes, I'm cranky. I have too much to do to be this sidetracked by my body.

What was that again? Oh yeah, it's telling me to slow down.

Aye, aye, ma'am.