Film Memories

The year was 1975.

I was six years old and remember it vividly. I was excited because I was going to the movies. For some reason, my mother and my uncle foolishly agreed to take me to the show. Dad was home with my infant brother.

Going out with my uncle was always a treat, I so much enjoyed being around him. He was a unique individual. He was my mother’s oldest brother and what I most remember about him was his laugh. He was always either telling a joke or laughing at one. He had a wicked sense of humor that I didn’t always understand, but made my mother laugh uproariously. She tells me to this day that my sense of humor reminds her of his.

Mom says that she and her brother used to stay up late into the night watching Johnny Carson. Humor defined my uncle and played an important part of first their, and then later our, relationship. I remember confiding in my uncle about how I felt slower than my friend Chip who lived down the street. My Uncle told me that he was sure I could beat Chip in a race if I just kept working at it. (He was absolutely wrong on that point, Chip always toasted me).

One other thing about my uncle. He was a quadriplegic. He was struck with polio in his late teens as he finished up high school. Before the disease he was tall and athletic and according to family tradition, had a full baseball scholarship to the University of Texas. I never saw his hands strong enough to swing a bat or grip a ball. In my mind’s eye they are always locked in an odd angle, incapable of movement.

So going to the movies was a special treat. Mom got out his wheelchair and picked him up and placed him in it, as she had thousands of times before. We wheeled him in and bought our tickets. The theater marquee had a huge caricature of Jerry Lewis next to the listing of all the films. Inside, where you waited in line for popcorn and a coke, was a mural of a crowd of the Hollywood greats. So you stood there waiting for your Milk Duds alongside the Duke, Groucho, and Marilyn.
We sat in the back of the theater (this was a fifteen years before the Americans with Disabilities Act) with my uncle in the aisle. My mother sat next to my uncle and I sat next to her. I’m sure we talked a bit before the film began, but that is not what I remember most.

The film was the Return of the Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers as Jacques Clouseau. And I can recall the precise moment, the nanomemory where my love affair with film began. Clouseau was trying to get into the (Notorious) Litton’s home and disguised himself as a telephone repairman. He borrowed a telephone repair van and drove down a hill. The brakes went out and (as I recall) the stick shift came off in his hand. His garbled French and English combined in fright as he hurtled off the street and through a row of bushes. The van then took flight and crashed into a swimming pool where it sank like a cartoon anvil.

It was at that moment that I turned to look at my mom and my uncle and saw that they were each laughing. I laughed too. That image of the three of us laughing is locked in my mind.

Two years later my uncle finally succumbed to polio. I still remember the phone call when my mother told me he died. In recent years I sometimes stop in Emory to visit his grave. I regret that he didn’t get to know my beautiful wife (with a wicked sense of humor herself) or his great nieces. He also missed getting to know the great nephew who would one day bear his name.

But Clouseau is still chasing the Pink Panther diamond. And now I can put the DVD in and watch it with my kids and laugh at the same scene.

I bet that it still makes my uncle laugh too.