Blog 571 – 03.14.2017
A Tribute To The Movies

I love movies and as much as I love a good book I was before I could ever read a  movie fan. Some of my favorite memories as a child involved sitting in the dark eating popcorn and candy and watching stories unfold on the big screen. Before I ever started school I had seen countless black and white movies on the little screen in our living room. Many of these old black and white movies my parents had seen in some of the same movie theaters that I saw the movies of my childhood and youth. I grew up in a religious tradition where they were forever talking bad about the influence of movies. It is an old fogie argument to blame new technology or new ideas for what is perceived as downward spiral in morals. Those things come from inside out not outside in.

I have been off work for almost two months due to the crew I inspect being shut down for the Wisconsin winter. I have seen even more new release movies than I usually do. Hardly a week passes that I do not go to the movies at least once. It doesn’t take me long wherever I am assigned to find the nearest movie theater and feel right at home. Last summer I lived near a Drive In movie theater and went every weekend till they shut it down for the season. I hope I get to go again in a few months. Each outdoor viewing of a movie is like a blast from the past.

Last Saturday I saw a wonderful new movie at the Millennium Theater in Platteville, Wisconsin. The title of the movie is Before I Fall. It is about a pretty young girl, a senior in High School, who is forced by fate to relive the last day of her life over and over again. But finally she gets it right and is allowed to move on. The great lesson of the movie to me is that we only get one day to live. That is today and how well we live it depends on how much we are paying attention. They used to say, “The Devil is in the details” I disagree for I think that Love is in the details. Each new day we get a chance to get it right, to hug, to heal, to help those near us and how well we do that is the only judge of whether it is a good day, the best day of our lives.

Life to me is like a good movie with a happy ending.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White