There are people who will tell you about how certain smells trigger memories in their brain, I’m not one of those people. I love the smell of sugar cookies and fresh baked cinnamon rolls, but they don’t bring up memories of a happy childhood, my mother baking in the kitchen, they just make me hungry. But movies…
I’ve talked before about my association between memory and film, specifically Jurassic Park and I think (briefly) The Shawshank Redemption. More than just about any other movies, those two make me reminisce (Con Air too…a story for another time). But, the one that takes me back more than those is a western starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson. Yeah, Rio Bravo.
I think it could be because it’s the one movie that precedes the realization of my love of cinema. (Well, there’s Star Wars, but as a kid they weren’t really movies to me, they were extensions of my imagination, or maybe the beginnings of it, and also a story for another time.) Rio Bravo is one of those movies that has always been for me. What I mean is, I never discovered it.
Example: I love, love, LOVE Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but it’s a movie I had to find my way too, Rio Bravo has always been there. And, really, there’s a number of people who carry the responsibility for that, the biggest one probably being my Grandmother.
Now, it wasn’t her favorite film, that honor belonged to the 80’s classic Dirty Dancing. I’m a man of faith, so I believe in Heaven, and while I was saddened that Patrick Swayze passed away this year, I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that somewhere, my Grandmother was taking dance lessons from a man she had, to put it bluntly, lusted after for years. She would sit on that ratty old couch in her trailer, clapping her hands and smiling while Johnny taught Baby the mambo, along with a few of life’s harder lessons. So, no, it wasn’t her favorite film, but if she had a second, I’m pretty confident that this was it.
The story of the movie is really inconsequential, at least as far as this post is concerned. In fact, I’ll be upfront and say that anything positive I have to say about the actual details (story, dialogue, acting, directing, editing, etc.) of this film is probably skewed by my memories (It does have an 8/10 on IMDB though). I’ve read plenty of negative comments about the movie, and never found a single ounce of merit in one of them. This is a perfect film for me, or at least as close as there could possibly ever be to one. And that has a lot to do with those memories.
I do believe it’s my Uncle Bink’s favorite film, and it’s really high on the list for my Father and his other brother, my Uncle Glen. It’s also a favorite film of my twin brother and well as my Uncle Glen’s wife, Joann. So, yeah, it’s a family affair, and I think that all goes back to my Grandmother.
She passed away five years ago on December 10th. At once that seems like it was a lifetime ago and just last year. She had moved to Oklahoma with my two Uncles and their families and lived out her last few years there. I didn’t get to see her after she left, and only had the occasional phone call, usually on holidays or birthdays. It’s something I still regret, but eventually it just got too hard to make time with her that way, and when her mind started to go it was just too damn painful.
Before that though, years before her health problems started to get the best of her, there wasn’t anything I loved more than hanging out with my family in that crappy old trailer. There were a lot of things we watched on TV in that place; Falcons football, Braves baseball, every game show that came on TV (I wish she’d lived long enough to get the Game Show Network and the Western Channel), weather, news (that TV gave me and m Uncle Bink the first report of Mickey Mantles death, we had just come from a late night/early morning baseball card run to the local Wal-Mart), reruns of Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith…in fact, when her cabinet color TV started to go, we had a special taped episode of Andy Griffith (the Citizens Arrest episode with the feud between Barney and Gomer) that we would have to put in to get the color to come back. I’m still not sure why that worked, and it often required a little fiddling with the contrast and such, but it did. And no one could get it to work faster than my brother Ryan. And we watched Rio Bravo, alot.
I can see her kitchen table as clear as if it were sitting next to me. I mentioned baseball cards with my Uncle…that table might have seen more trading cards than any other kitchen table before or since. For a good long wile it was an obsession with us (me, my brother, my Uncles, my Dad, my cousin Jacob). There was a time in my adult life where I slept on a bed that was supported by giant plastic bins of trading cards. But, there were a lot of great, meaningless conversations held around that table, and a lot of them were had while tearing open packages of those cards. I’ll still stroll by the card aisle in Wal-Mart or Target and pick up the occasional pack, relishing the sound of the plastic as it tears, the smell of the fresh ink on the cards (there’s a smell memory I have!), the excitement of getting a chase card in the pack, and the disappointment of not getting one. Only now I don’t get to share that experience with anyone, it’s just me opening them, but it’s still nice to bring back those memories like that.
And if it wasn’t cards it was games. We loved a good board game. My Grandmother’s favorite was a game called Pollyana. My dad still has the board we played on, as well as most of the dice we used. We all had our own dice, see…we kept them in this big, oversized glass cup she had. I can’t remember what everyone else’s dice looked like, but mine are etched into my brain like some invisible tattoo. They were red and wooden, and kind of tiny. They’d once had gold paint in the divots, but that flaked off pretty early on. THOSE were MY dice. I’m not sure if my Dad still has them or not, but it doesn’t matter, I’ll never forget what they looked like.
If it wasn’t Pollyanna, then it was probably Canasta, a game at which my Grandmother and Aunt Joann (Aunt Jody to us, actually) were UNBEATABLE. The point of that card game was never to win, it was simply to beat them. To this day I think they cheated. Occasionally we played Rummy or maybe even penny poker, but Canasta…that was one that she loved to play the most…probably because she always won…
That table also saw a lot of jigsaw puzzles. And, I have to say, of all the things I miss about that table, putting puzzles together is probably at the top of the list. For us, assembling the pieces wasn’t a race, it was more like a marathon. One we’d run over the course of a month. It wasn’t too often that there’d be more than two or three of us sitting there putting it together, but by the end of it we’d likely all participated in it’s reconstruction. People came and went as they pleased in that trailer. Her door was always open. So, if there was a puzzle to be assembled, they’d sit down at the table, asking her about her day as she carefully studied the pieces, or asking her what the score of the game was as she sat on the couch watching her favorite teams play and they plugged in their own contribution. As long as you remembered to do the edges first, she didn’t care how much or how little you did. And, usually we’d save the very last piece for her…if we didn’t lose it.
I can still see that table, so very clear in my mind. And, when I watch Rio Bravo, I’m not watching it from my bed, or the couch, or my chair. I’m watching it from that table, from those uncomfortable wooden seats, with their crappy padding. I’m playing Canasta, or Pollyana, or putting a puzzle together.
When she died we made a mix tape of music to be played at her wake. I still have a copy of it somewhere, but I don’t listen to it because it’s just too much for me. Patrick Swayze singing “She’s Like the Wind” was most certainly on there, but so were tunes from Rio Bravo. Every time I watch the movie, when Ricky, Dean and Walter hole themselves up in that jail and start singing, I can still see the smile on my Grandmother’s face, her legs moving to the beat, hands clapping.
When I say that her move to Oklahoma tore our family apart, I do mean it literally. As long as she was here there was the hope that my Uncle’s and Aunts and cousins would movie back. After she left to live with them that hope went with her. I don’t begrudge them their life in OK, but I miss them, all of us still here in Georgia do, they’re family. But things change, whether we want them to or not.
Her birthday is in four days (As my Father would say: “December 5th, a day that will live in infamy!”). She would have been 80 this year. In her lifetime she gave a lot to the people around her, usually her gifts were those of story or food, because, well, those were the things she liked to do, but sometimes her gifts came in more difficult packages, like taking her to do her grocery shopping or having to drive all the way out to Ladonia just to bring her a hamburger. The last gift she ever gave, she gave at her funeral, and at the time it was of the more difficult variety.
Due to some really strange circumstances she was, indeed, late to her own funeral. It was here, in Columbus, and so my family from OK naturally came home. As we waited for her to get here, all of us laughing at the insanity of what was going on so as to keep from crying, we got to spend one more week, all of us, together again. All of us except her, because, well, she was stuck in Oklahoma! At her wake they had a table set up, four chairs around it, but one of those chairs was tilted up and in, it’s neck leaning on top of the table. That used to be a sign that a player had left. She was out of the game.
That was the last gift she gave us, one more moment that she brought us all together, but it’s not my favorite. No, the best thing Alice “Johnnie” Polk ever gave me was Rio Bravo. A movie that doesn’t just bring back the memory of watching it in that tin building she called a home, but the memory of a life spent with her, the memory of what it meant to be a family. She was born December 5th 1929 and died five days after her 75th birthday. I remember the last conversation I ever had with her was on her birthday. I didn’t get her anything, I didn’t even send a card, I think we all knew what was coming, and we were all preparing ourselves for it. Doesn’t matter though, nothing I ever gave her could be as wonderful as the memories that this movie conjures up.
So, for one week every December, Rio Bravo is my favorite film of all time. It’s so damn close to perfect that I’d hate to have to live on the difference.
I love you Nannie, and I miss you more than I could ever express. Happy birthday.
And try to take it easy on Swayze.
