Reading and Movie Commentary

Today I read a short story in The New Yorker by Alice Munro, about poor Scottish immigrants to Canada around 1918 and the long shipboard voyage. I didn't want the story to end--it was almost like a fairy tale, a world so completely gone now and yet so lovingly imagined. I liked the way the narrator limned the thoughts of each character in the family, not without criticism but forgivingly: the unfavored, unloved sister who was besotted to obsession with her little nephew James; Old James, the grandfather who went around telling everyone on shipboard superstitious country stories about old Scottish royalty and ghosts and elves, stories that he made fun of back home but now seemed to need to present; Agnes, the mother of little James, pregnant with her second child and harsh and impatient with her first; and the two brothers, Andrew, Agnes's husband, and Walter, only 17, who keeps a journal of the trip and befriends an upper-class young girl who is traveling with her father only and has an onimous cough. Then there is Doctor Suter, who delivers Agnes's baby in a cabin made available by the two "ladies from Edinburgh" who have one of only four cabins on board. Through it all there are matter-of-fact and unsentimental allusions to the sufferings of women who might bear 8 or 9 children before they are well out of their 20s. And there are mothers who are missing and missed by their daughters.

The story did end, alas.

In the mood for more storytelling, I rented a movie later in the evening. In Good Company, an implausible but pleasing comedy with Dennis Quaid as the family man in his early 50s who suffers the indignity of being demoted at his corporate job and having to report to a young outsider half his age. Well, that part wasn't so implausible, but some of the twists and turns the story takes after that are. I won't give anything away, except that, predictably enough, the character played by Quaid becomes a mentor to the younger man. At one point the young guy, wistful about the older man's happy marriage (to beautiful Marge Helgenberger), asks what his secret is. The older man answers, "It's easy. You just pick the right person to be in the foxhole with and keep your dick in your pants when you're out of the foxhole."

I kind of liked that.