It was tradition on a Sunday night after the evening service at church. We would rush home, pop some popcorn in our antique and very treasured oil popper, break into some ice cream, and gather in the kitchen for a movie. Our kitchen was designed so that at the end of our large island cabinet, there was room for our arthritic television. When not in use (as was the goal for most ultraconservative families), the television could disappear back into the cabinet on its slider tray.
But once the ice cream was scooped and the popcorn filled into bowls, the four of us kids and usually Dad would figure out which movie to watch. Would it be So Proudly We Hail, our beloved Claudette Colbert movie about nurses in the Philippines in World War II where one of the characters scandalously wore a black nightgown (long, lace covering everything up) as an evening dress as she said, “to keep up my morale”? Or would Dad and my brother win and we watch for the thousandth time, Kelly’s Heroes, that great 1968 Clint Eastwood classic about a lot of gold hidden in a French bank and where Donald Sutherland continually barked, “What is with the negative waves?”
Or, the one movie we have yet to see the end of, Private Number, a 1936 romance starring Loretta Young and Robert Taylor, which movie critics give a very ho-hum two stars. Perhaps we loved the movie so much because we never did see the ending. Our neighbors would tape the movies off their television (they had cable and American Movie Classics) and sometimes the tape would run out before the movie was over. The recording we watched was the only time Private Number was ever aired on AMC. There are no copies available for purchase or rent; we’ve looked. Someday, perhaps.
I just found one of my perennial favorites, Letter to Three Wives, a 1949 flick starring Jeanne Crain and a very young Kirk Douglas, on Netflix last week. As soon as I started watching (I love the Netflix instant play feature!) I wished for the fraternity of my siblings and parents, wishing it were Sunday night at the old house up on the hill, and that we were all gathered together again in that huge kitchen staring down under the counter at a too-small-television.
Sometimes we make the best memories when we don’t even know it. I would call that a Good Thing from those years.
{ 4 comments }
How I treasure those “good things”
Yup. They mean so much!
Very Good Things!! Love Ya Lots!!
Thanks, Mom! Have a great night out with Dad!
Comments on this entry are closed.