magusdesign007

My father, an otherwise stoic albeit warm-hearted military man loved the Universal Monsters. One year on my birthday he happened to find the muse to wax nostalgic about his own favorite birthday celebration. It seems when he was a kid his family (like most historic families of cliche and antiquity) had little money for anything outside the necessities, so they went without frivolous toys or anything requiring an entertainment budget, except that is for the kids on their birthdays. On their Birthdays my father and his siblings were allowed to choose ONE thing to do within reason of their own desire, and on the day of my Pops 13th birthday his choice was to go down to the local movie theater on Queens Blvd and see the matinee feature of "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" ALL BY HIMSELF.
My father's first ever solo excursion was given the all clear, and come January 10th he packed a lunch, and a thermos, put on his warm coat (formerly his brothers warm coat) and he was on his way, waving to his mother as he left shallow tracks in the snowy path behind him. He reached the theater with plenty of time to spare, and he watched the cartoons before the feature sprang to life in all it's black and white glory. He watched it once, then stayed for the second showing, then again, and again and soon enough after the 6th showing the usher came down the aisle to tell him the theater would be closing.
It seems he was so enchanted by the magic of the monster movie that time just didn't seem to exist. How long he had been in the theater My father wouldn't fully realize until he walked out into the darkness of the Astoria street lamps. He went home that night fearful of the hell he would catch from his own dad, who was a hard lived blue collar man, a lineman on the NY City subway, for having stayed out all day. Upon his arrival home he discovered that dinner was waiting for him with an un-compromised birthday cake quietly anticipating the lighting of it's single candle (hey candles cost money!). He heard a sound in the living room and saw his dad sitting under a lamp in the reading chair looking over the sports section of the paper. My Dad's Dad stood up with a still smoldering pipe in hand and walked to the table, to stand in front of his newly 13 year old son, his lips cracked long enough to show a tobacco stained toothy smile. He put the pipe between his lips and took a packet of wooden matches from his pocket, opening it swiftly as his trained hands had done a thousand times before. He struck the match against the sand-papery side of the box and it erupted with a flash of sulfur, he let the match linger long enough to supply the flame with fuel for safe transport without it flickering away, then gently extended the flame away from himself, over the lace table cloth and lit the birthday candle.

"Sit Down Thomas, you can eat your dinner and tell me about the movie" He said.
To my father's surprise he wasn't angry at all, he was happy, just happy to sit and talk to his son, an occurrence much more rare even than Birthdays in that house, and my father who i have trouble imagining as a giddy boy, must have been just that, eager to share the silly plot line and the predictable and hardly thrilling twists and turns of the B movie he had just delighted through 6 times. The seventh and most important iteration coming now not from the screen but from his lips to his father's ears.
My dad finished his meat and potatoes at the same time that he finished his story. That moment the smoking man cracked a smile again and said
"You need to blow out the candle and make a wish, Thomas"

As ordered the flame was turned with a gust to a thin spire of smoke and they both smiled in concert before taking larger than fair portions of cake. My grandfather, uncommonly, I'm told, then recounted stories of his favorite movies from his own youth, silent films and westerns mostly, and in that moment the two of them were both just boys telling stories, young men enjoying the common reaches of their imaginations brought to life on screen as they finished their last bites of cake. It was the happiest birthday my father said he had ever had, and the closest he had ever felt to his own dad.

It wasn't until my father was a grown man and my grandfather had passed on that my grandmother told him the truth of the details of that day. That my father had never truly been alone in that theater. Not five minutes after my father had left the house, my grandfather set out behind his son tracking him to the theater, buying his own ticket and sitting right their in the theater not 5 rows behind his son, the whole day taking only a few minutes between each show to call home and give my grandmother an update from the payphone in the lobby. And half an hour before the closing of the theater my grandfather snuck himself out of the show and made his way home so that his son would never know he had not been nearly as independent as he thought.

I never knew my grandfather, he passed on a few years after this story took place, and my father passed away too early as well, but I think of this story and am reminded that we're all just fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and from time to time I feel like a kid all alone in the theater. And I'd like to think there's someone watching out for me 5 rows back