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Reflection for January 23, 2005

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Re-membering

My memory prior to age five is pretty vacant. There's an impression of a parlor decorated for Christmas. There's the echo of a bell announcing the arrival of an ice-cream vendor. There's a partially completed picture puzzle featuring men in bright red hunting jackets. And then there are flickering images of a movie scene that has haunted me all my life. I can only assume my mother had decided to take me with her to a Saturday matinee despite my tender age. Whatever the circumstances, I remember the screen's image of a young man in a roadster driving down a narrow road behind a two door coupe driven by a woman. The young man is frantic because he can see that a truck, parked on a hill, has lost its brakes and begun to roll toward the road. Try as he might, he can't get the attention of the woman who stares stonily ahead. Then comes a terrific collision. The truck crushes the coupe.

In all the subsequent years of my more conscious existence, that scene keeps coming back to me. It returns in moments of idleness, isolated from any fuller remembrance of the circumstances in which I first beheld it. Indeed, there have been times when I wondered whether it was a morbid product of my own imagination. And then along came Cable with its old movie channels and I thought, "Maybe that scene will pop up one day in some TV revival." It never did. Of course, what were the odds that would happen? A million to one? I mean we're talking about one scene out one movie out of all the films made between 1928 and 1934. And we're assuming that, if the movie still existed and a movie channel actually selected it to be shown in the course of a year, I would be present at that precise moment to catch it. Not likely!

But then! On Friday, April 20th, 2001, while wasting some time before supper, I turned on an old movie channel. A 1933 W.C. Fields feature was ending, to be followed by one of those old Saturday matinee shorts. I watched it casually, not even stimulated by its topic of mental telepathy. A young man, having overslept, is groggily preparing to go to work. He pays passing notice of his mother's photo on his dresser and then descends to his roadster and pauses. He thinks he hears his mother's voice, saying, "John! John!" - but she's in faraway Chicago. He dismisses the thought and goes to start his car and realizes he has left his key by his mother's picture on the dresser. Irritated, he goes back for it and then sets off to work. (Ho-hum!)

Now he's driving through a residential area and out onto a narrow highway. (I sat up on the couch!) Ahead of him was a gray coupe driven by a woman in a bell shaped hat. ("This is it!" I shouted, as I leaped to my feet.) At the top of a hill a truck's brakes give way and down it comes. The young man looks helpless. The truck smashes the coupe. A crowd gathers. The young man realizes he was spared the same fate by the delay initiated by what he thought was his mother's voice. But what moved me more than my recovery of the film's actual story or theme was how - after sixty-eight years - all the pieces of a puzzle had come together for me around the one piece I had retained. In some small way, I felt fulfilled.

Some theologians use amnesia or forgetfulness to explain the plight of our human race. Somewhere (they say) back at the time of our collective origin, we forgot our relationship with a truly personal Creator and wandered off, like Adam and Eve and Cain, to make our way independently in this world. The consequence? This nightmare we call "the news of the day". But that's where the Church, the Bible and the sacraments come in - because their whole intent is to heal our amnesia, to put us back in touch with that WHOLE picture without which your life and mine are but fragments of consciousness.

Reprint from 2001

-- Geoff Wood