Dyslexic Deja Vu
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Pop culture, especially movies has had a profound effect on my life. More and more I have come to realize that I am really just an amalgam of all the most poignant characters in my favourite movies.
This was most evident last night while at the dusk to dawn showing at the Starlite Drive-In at 59 Green Mountain Rd E, Stoney Creek. It was about 5 a.m., just before dawn when Jeff Bridges but the reins in his teeth and took out two guns and started riding toward the Ned Pepper gang.
Like a dyslexic déjà vu I remembered watching the original “True Grit” in the same damn place at the Starlite (we a were at the original screen) with my parents back in the summer of ’69, back when I only had one brother. We had just arrived in Ontario after the last day of grade 1.
Literally I left school and boarded a CN train and we headed for Ontario. My dad had made some rather unethical sales at Abbey Life, perhaps even illegal sales like as in selling people insurance much higher than they could afford, something to that effect and he hadn’t told my mom. Instead he told her he was getting relocated to the Burlington office and packed us up and moved us off.
When we arrived in Ontario we had to live in Motel in Stoney Creek somewhere near what is now Eastgate Square. We lived there for about a month until we moved into a house on Bromley Road, in Burlington and we stayed in Burlington. My dad set up his own business, Shamrock Enterprises, which he ran into the ground and eventually he lost everything and many people came into our house and took all out belongings of any value some time shortly after the first moon landing.
It was that summer that we went to Starlite Drive. I saw “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “The Prime of Miss jean Brody”, and “True Grit”. I fell in love with Paul Newman that summer, I saw on screen nudity for the first time and realized that girls need not be cultured to the exclusion of hard knowledge. I also decided that I wasn’t going to be one of those frilly girls and if pushed comes to shove I wanted to be Mattie Ross. I wanted to be the kind of female who would push back, avenged wrong doings and hold my own against grown ass criminals.
Well, over 40 years later while watching the remake of “True Grit” at the same damn Drive In I went to as a child, the same one I took my own kids to, the same one I saw Jaws at….. I realized that I actually am Mattie Ross.
I made it through my torturous childhood; through beatings and bullying and various forms of rape. I made it through my mothers 6 year battle with cancer that she subsequently lost. I made it through 9 funerals in 10 years including the loss of my 2 best friends, Doug McCormack and Alain Heroux. I made it through my father’s suicide and lived to fight my own demons as well as a couple of ex husbands. I am fighting my way through the death of my eldest child, my one and only begotten son. I am fighting the biggest battle of my life; losing Dylan when he was 22 years old. I will win because I have true grit.
I also realized that I too have come out of all this with battle scars. Sure I didn’t lose my arm to a rattle snake bite but I’ve lost other parts of me that I simply cannot get back. Life’s better though bittersweet now and I’m a lot more like Rooster than I am Mattie but that’s okay.
Time does have a way of getting away from you.