Journal 62 Mermaids

I've been blogging about them from my time in Maine, and the artwork I saw.

Oddly, the movie was on TV last night, an all-time favourite of mine, and in an out-of-character experience for me, I watched the whole thing. I didn't sit and watch it, because that is not how I watch TV, but I flitted and watched it, made dinner and watched it, ate dinner and watched it, and generally flipped back in time, to 1990, where I was the same age as Winona Ryder's Charlotte character when the movie first came out.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100140/

I saw it in an Oshawa theatre with my sister when it was first released in 1990, and I fell in love with it immediately.

I loved the music, I loved Winona (still do) and Cher (still do), and I loved the setting.

Little did I know that it was New England (Massachusetts to be exact) and that I would come to know and love that region of the U.S. for my own reasons at this stage in my life.

As I watched the movie I felt my own teenage angst, an angst that really, never goes away.

It just changes shape, like the woman into the mermaid, and back again.

The worries about love, about the future, the fears about anything happening to your family...they just transform, they loom, and they challenge even more.

I get alot of interesting viewpoints on all of these challenges from all the people in my life, and the people whose blogs I read, in various agegroups.

Reading some 20-something blogs yesterday, I was smiling to myself as one newlywed decreed that there were 2 types of women: A and B.

A hounded men to marry her and was single;

B took her time, played it cool, and ended up married.

I wished it was as simple as that; but I did envy the confidence it took to assert that statement.

I remember a friend of mine who lost her mother young saying to me that the one upside of that happening when she was fifteen was that this death affected her only--she didn't have to 'do' anything, except experience and feel it.

Not that that would be even close to easy--but I admired the way she turned the situation and the memory of it into something special, not just something tragic, and I carried those words with me through-out my father's entire illness, and thereafter-the dealing with funeral-planning, the writing of an obituary, the delivery of a eulogy, the execution of the will-the 'business' of death, so to speak-all of that had a huge effect on me, and I came to carry her words as a talisman of sorts. Strange, I know. I may not be explaining it right, but that's how it felt.

The IMDB describes Mermaids thusly;
An unconventional single mother relocates with her two daughters to a small Massachusetts town in 1963, where a number of events and relationships both challenge and strengthen their familial bonds.

I guess maybe that's why I love this movie--that second part of the sentence, after the comma.
That despite all the events and relationships we experience and store, there can be strength borne out of it all, even if it seems impossible at the time.