High Noon at 8 PM

Last night I visited my parents. I figured I'd update them on my ever-advancing relationship with Terry, but I really had no actual reason for the visit. My mother has taken up playing bridge and when I arrived, she was just leaving to go play somewhere. In fact, I had to go right back out the door to move my car out from behind her car in the driveway.

My dad was on the sofa sitting in front of the TV. He asked me if I wanted a beer and I told him I could go for a glass of red wine. That was not the first time my father has asked me if I wanted a beer, but I still can't get used to it. I'm his little girl, after all. Anyway he told me that they did not have any wine, but I knew that they did. I brought over a bottle a month or so ago, just for my consumption.

I poured a glass and then sat in a chair next to my father on the sofa. That afternoon he had bought a DVD of the old movie High Noon. He had intended to watch it by himself since he knew my mother would be gone. But my dad knows that I am not my mother. I don't need a chick flick or a movie with super heroes. I will watch mysteries, historical dramas, and old westerns. If the movie is good, I will usually stay interested and ultimately get something out of it.

Before the movie even started my father casually informed me that he had seen High Noon when he was a little kid. He said that he had seen it on TV sometime around 1960 when he was 9 or 10. His mother, my grandmother, had told him that it was a good movie and he ought to sit there and watch it. "It'll be good for you," my dad recollected his mother saying.

I found it intriguing and in its own way comforting that my dad could not only remember that brief talk all these years later, but he was sort of telling me the same basic thing about the movie. It played into my sense of nostalgia, perhaps heightened by a red wine. You know a movie is going to be good when it speaks to you personally even before it appears on the screen.