The Sunday Letter #23
After a few emotional breakdowns, broken locks, and lost boxes, we finally moved into our new house. On an unceremonious Monday afternoon one week ago, I showed up in the middle of the day to collect the keys to our new home from our real estate agent, who nervously informed me that he’d left the keys inside the house and we were now locked out. This was in the midst of my dog’s groomer texting me that she was ready to be picked up (it’s a bougie place and I’m not supposed to keep them waiting. Plus, my dog is hopped up on CBD oil because she gets overstimulated at the groomer and the last time she was there they accidentally cut her tongue, but she’s never gone anywhere else and they really love her so we can’t change course now) and the realtor needed to be out of town in the next twenty minutes. My husband was at work and I was in the middle of a day-off that wasn’t really a day-off because I was also packing our life up and packing for a trip to the mountains and filling out work applications and making little mistakes all over the place. All that to say, I took a deep breath and laughed it off: “mistakes happen,” I told the realtor. Two emergency locksmith visits and $150 later we had a new lock and a new house, and I promptly set off to Jasper, Alberta, with my mom and sister.
We joined a food tour while we were in Jasper, stopping for bites at local restaurants and learning the history of the town. The tour group mostly consisted of American retirees, lifelong friends who golfed and vacationed together and carried NRA tote bags. We often ended up chatting with a Missourian couple, consisting of a golly older man and a pert young blonde who told me they’d been married twenty-five years. They arrived late and breathless, with the blonde explaining that she’s always early and organized but that he’d wanted to take a scenic route on their way into town. “That’s why we get along,” he teased. “That’s not why we get along,” she laughed back. Later, one of the retirees told us that he was a double Virgo—”don’t even get him started,” said his friend.
Later, we went for happy hour drinks on a rainy patio and shivered in our raincoats. We chatted with our waitress, who told us that she’d moved to Jasper from Edmonton (a four-hour drive) around 7 years ago. At the time, she’d been lonely, because her boyfriend was a fourth generation Jasper resident and knew everyone, while she had no one. When COVID arrived, and everyone was suddenly “sad and alone at home,” she felt vindicated that they finally understood how she’d felt all along.
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I think it was on TikTok that I saw someone talk about how grief grows alongside us. As in, a child who experiences serious loss will relive that loss as they age into new milestones and develop new emotional capacities to understand their grief. Sometimes I think that it’s a lifelong process. Grief hits, sometimes, in the happiest moments. I was packing up the paintings and pictures in our last rental on the day we were set to move and I broke down in tears, suddenly overcome with a well of sadness that my dad isn’t around to see me make this new step.
As I’ve written before, grief often feels like this waxy thing I’m waiting to calcify around my heart. Something that can grow with me, live alongside me. It arrives in waves, in these biggest moments, to remind me that I can live through the worst of things, that I’ve done it before. But what about the good things? What about when you have so much joy that it feels like it can’t possibly be sustained? The happiest moments are tinged with the saddest ones: I don’t know how to be happy without the anxiety of what comes next. And this milestone fatigue, when grief and growth entwine, has left me depleted.
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Maybe Rachel Cusk was right when she said that the narrative impulse springs from guilt. When I feel alienated and bizarre, embarrassed or shamed, I turn to writing. I put it all in words and I pretend no one will ever read it, knowing full well that I’m not the only one to have ever felt this way. Relief at sorrow, sorrow at joy. But today I’m looking out of my new window, feeling a complicated joy, and at peace with it all.
This week’s recommendations
The following reviews were published during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023. The work would not exist without the labour of writers and actors. You can learn more about how to support the labour strikes here and here.
Heat (dir. Michael Mann, 1995) — A few evenings ago, I was beset by a wicked spell of anxiety and fatigue. We watched this movie, and I was cured. Worth it for Al Pacino’s absolutely bananas delivery of “baby.” PS, thank you L for reminding me of the New Girl Al Pacino scene.
The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) — Inspired by Ashley Reese’s viral Twitter poll on whether young Al Pacino was hotter than young Robert De Niro (I’m firmly in Camp De Niro but I’ll admit I have wavered), we picked up Coppola’s 1972 epic drama. Holds up!
The Godfather Part II (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) — Holds up a bit less! I get that people often suggest this was the superior film of the trilogy, but the pacing was off and De Niro wasn’t given enough to do. Also, I continue to find women’s roles in these types of films (see also: Goodfellas) so interesting. In the first film, Don Corleone’s wife Carmela, matriarch of the family, tells her son not to interfere after he berates his brother-in-law for insulting his sister. In The Godfather Part II, Carmela is given little to no backstory to explain her compliance in the business, other than one day appearing in Vito’s life alongside an increasing number of children. Like Goodfellas, women only exist in these films to give the men something to protect, to produce male heirs, and to never ask questions. They appear in the background shots as they cook and clean, away from the men’s work. In other words, I’d love a Godfather prequel based entirely on the women. Is that too much to ask?? PS in
fashion I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole post-Godfather only to discover that Pacino and De Niro both made it on to the “List of oldest fathers” Wiki page. Fun!*
A.S. Hamrah on Tom Cruise, Mission: Impossible, and a film industry in crisis. See also Caity Weaver’s fantastic recent piece, “My Mission Impossible to Find Tom Cruise.”
A Slate review of the upcoming film Passages looks at the state of the cinematic sex scene. See also RS Benedict’s great piece, “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One is Horny.”
n+1 reviews Barbie. See also Leslie Jamison on “Why Barbie Must Be Punished.”
Juliana Spahr on carework, and that thorny time in adulthood when parents become sick.
Ann Friedman on the history of gatekeeping.
New word of the week: oneiric (o·nei·ric) — adjective — relating to dreams or dreaming. In film theory, oneiric “refers to the depiction of dream-like states or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state in the analysis of a film.”
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Lastly, I was touched by this moving piece by
which referenced a previous Sunday letter of mine, about living in various homes and feeling changed by each one:“My mind defaults to segmenting my life by geography because each place has discernibly changed who I am. If change is what creates segments, then there must be other ways of dividing the past.”