Maya’s counts have risen…enough to have an outing other than hospital bidness. So the other day we bundled her up in comfy post-winter cloths and a (99% clean air) mask and my far too groovy to be a newbie best girl & I took a nice drive to a nearby Cinemark Theater to see Gran Torino (in a sparse of hum and bustle afternoon matinee; the only way Maya can be in public while she’s immuno-suppressant post BMT). Cinemark theaters are easily the best engineered (“normal”) cinemas we’ve been enjoying for the past 20 years or so. Never been? Go check one out.

Clint Eastwood, old as granite now, can still create a fine example of the moving pictures. Even gave his son a dues-paying little roll as “Pussy-ass.” This “little film” has a kind of “antique-movie” moxy, steely balls and a BIG one-two punch message in that quiet-man language that’s slow becoming passé in the 21st Century. No doubt Clint Eastwood made this excellent flicker film knowing that the general hoi-polloi and the influential, for the most part, would not allow it to score a lot of miles…..or awards for that matter. It’s just too none-politically-correct. Although a friend (in a PM) pointed out (observantly so) that for all the “zipper-head” references, etcetera, ol’ Clint reined it in just a bit when using the term “colored-guy” in his bar joke. NAACP, Black Power baby!

What was a determining factor for us was this: There were, all told, 4 pairs of people spread apart in the theater and all 4 pairs (including us) sat and watched silently through the entire end song over credit run …and then a few joined in quiet applause. This flick (definitely a “little film”) has soul. In a Billy Jack way, …but not. I suppose you have to understand … or at least have known a few of the outstanding examples of … my dad’s (Korean War Vet) generation. Infuriating pains in the ass ~~ just as sure as tyranny & irresponsibility have reigned among the select, but they had (some still remaining have) something else, too: Grit, maybe, or a depth of calm wisdom rooted in anger, or whatever it was that made them the men they were. I don’t know because I’m not the same sort of man. How could I be? YOU may be, I don’t know, …we all have different sets of geographic circumstances, perhaps your surroundings continued to build the kind of “men” that America doesn’t quite create anymore. (& maybe it’s for the good, maybe not).

Not to say they were “the shit,” necessarily (as my pop could be a real fierce and abusive asshole on far too many levels), but (he) they had something about them. Something that made them the one you or I would turn to when the chips were down. For example: Once while pulling a reverse lay-up in a pickup game I came down on another’s foot and instead of turning the ankle I dislocated my knee. Nasty bad, the knee came all the way off to the right and bent the leg (I figured I’d broken it). Here I was like 13 and in amazing pain. Someone ran and got my pop. He showed up, pissed-off and fuming, then saw me there in cutoffs with my kneecap all wrong and swelling, kneeled before me, said: Let me see you. He gently worked his (Recon field first aid) hands down my agonized leg until he had one hand on my foot and the other on the calf and said: How’d this happen, son? Then just as my mind focused slightly off the throbbing and on to the explanation, he popped it into place (pflunk) lowering the pain by 75%, …hefted me up in his arms and carried me home to the living-room sofa.

Fucking brilliant act of nerve. If the same thing happened to one of mine, I’d have to call a paramedic and talk him through the pain until the pros arrived! It’s a little unnerving sometimes to have a hole in one’s confidence. Not a cavern, …but a crack. My ol’ man had a fierce and unapologetic temper much of the time that rode shotgun to a heart as big as the moon and a certain fearlessness. It kept us kids off balance at all times around the house. But he had a walk that he walked, ….and I will always be somewhat in awe of it, even though I couldn’t tell you what it was.