Life in the Movies

THE BLUE SKY held the moon above the mountains.  How could this scene be understood if you didn’t grow up in Utah?  My seven year old eyes looked, and I wondered.  How is that I see the Moon in the daytime?  The sky was summer clear blue. Three quarters of the celestial object were visible.  It was easy to see, but you still had to look for it.  If one looked Eastward from Holladay the moon could be viewed above Mount Olympus floating graceful yet solid.  My attention was caught on another heavenly object also.  To the North of Mr. Moon a jet was leaving its white stream across the sky.  From where I stood the jet seemed to be at a crawl.  Like an ant treading a smooth ocean.

It’s hard to imagine life without cinematic framing.  As a child of the late twentieth century I tend to make statements before I make the point.  That’s what I just did.  

Maybe we could focus on this cinematic theme for a moment.  I opened this chapter with something that could make a great opening shot for a movie.  Is that because I see life through cinematic eyes?  Surely more visual paragraphs have been written before the advent of moving pictures.  It would be interesting to know how much movies have affected my way of thinking.

When I was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Nebraska I first thought of this idea of life being related to movies.  Well, Elder John thought of it first actually.  

Elder David John was from Arizona.  He was born into the LDS Church.  At age 14 he was in an off-road accident.  This left him with amnesia.  He started living with a Jewish rabbi at age fifteen and converted to Judaism.  Later when challenged to read the Book of Mormon he was touched by a certain story and was convinced of The Book’s authenticity.  Thus he found, as an amnesiac Jew, that Jesus was The Messiah.  When I got home from my mission and saw The Lord of The Ring movies, I was blown away at the resemblance John had with Gollum.  Anyhow, I was driving a green Dodge Neon we used for appointments.  Elder John had been serving with me for about six weeks.  We were in an affluent part of Lincoln Nebraska.  We drove past a man strutting down the sidewalk.  When we drove past the man stared at us and then squinted down the road with a swagger to rival John Travolta.   John exhaled breath and said, “Gah, people make me sick.  They all think they’re in some movie or something, you know?  Like life is just a movie.  You know what I mean Elder West?  People are so stupid.”

So I’ve never seen a cinematic representation of the Salt Lake I know.  Every time I see that Moon in the daytime I wonder why no one has captured that on film.  Maybe someone has and I just haven’t seen it. 

If you ever get the chance, take a drive down Big Cottonwood Canyon in spring time.  Right when the sun is going down.  If you come up just right you can catch the dark glow of my valley.  Right when the Sun has gone behind the Oquirrh Mountains but is still giving light, the mountains would be dark around you.  But a golden glow would welcome you.  And that glow would fade as lights from kitchens, porches, and living rooms become magic.

That’s what I would like to capture on film.

Could you assemble your life in chronological order so that it made sense?  So that it had a point, or a theme?  

What level of pretentiousness do I have to write an autobiography at the age of twenty-seven years?

Music.  I always felt like I had a soundtrack to my life.  Maybe that’s because since my tenth birthday I’ve always owned some type of portable music player.  

Beer.  I really like beer.

The end.

These words are just a symbolic representation of experiences from my own perspective.  You can only understand these words because you’ve learned the symbolic meaning.  Most human beings I know understand the world through symbols, (at least as far as I can figure in my interpretation of their symbolic expressions anyhow).  

 

I suspect that rationality is a misnomer.