Making Summer Hang Around Longer

Just the other day in June we marked Summer Solstice and the First Day of Summer but already, with August having made its insidious appearance, we are preparing to bid summer goodbye. “Back-To-School” ads are all over the place, touting everything from crayon packs and pourable glue to 2-hole manual pencil sharpener and 2-ply facial tissue pocket pack. Most of the products have “scholastic” added in front of their labels, although it is anybody’s guess how a glue, other than being sticky, can also be scholastic.

How can this be? How can summer come and go so blindingly fast? It’s not fair. So here’s a list of things we can do to make summer stay longer, or at least linger, until we have repaired our body and soul from too much work, worry, stress and the unbearable irony of, well, life.

1. It all depends on the kids, really. Refuse to go to school until the second week of September. Easier said than done, you say? Maybe but it’s not as difficult as you think. Contrary to what they may say in public, teachers (the tenured ones anyway) will be delirious with joy if they don’t have to see their unruly, screaming wards until two or three weeks later than usual. The real problem is with the parents who had been praying for schools to reopen right after Independence Day celebrations. How to convince the parents? Simple. Start doing chores around the house with a single-mindedness that borders on the creepy. Do the dishes and then do the same dishes again. Do the laundry. Clean the kitchen and the bathrooms and the garage until they glow like fireflies. Haul out the garbage and if there is no more garbage to haul out, create some. In short, astound your parents with your conscience. They will hold you tight and not let you go until they must because it is September 15.

2. Fill up the hummingbird feeders with nectar. In a magical, mystical way, if hummingbirds linger, so will summer.

3. Drag the parents and the family cat to the local park and make them feed the ducks or the squirrels. If there are no ducks or squirrels, do some jumping jacks with the cat and wow everyone around with feline and human dexterity, even if a few scolds threaten to call the police for something about being a public nuisance. What’s summer if it isn’t also a little subversive?

4. Improve your vocabulary by memorizing a long word (at least ten letters) for each of the 26 alphabets in the English language. Use them at family meal times (all 11 meals per day must be with at least one member of the family) until mom and dad are convinced that sending a budding Brown (Dan) or Bellow (Saul) to school (that nips any talent in the bud anyway) too early will be criminal.

5. Talking about eating, be sure to include in your menu blueberries, green bananas, yogurt sprinkled with tiny heirloom tomato slices, carrots dipped in hummus, and the occasional partially-cooked eel. No parent will have the heart to replace this super-healthy food habit with what passes for food in the school cafeteria, until they must, starting September 15.

6. Swimming. Ah yes, swimming. What’s summer without swimming? Whether it’s in the ocean or the neighborhood creek, don’t begin your swimming adventure before the third week of August. Dangle the prospect of an Olympic medal before mom and dad. Although you come close to drowning more than once, you convince them that you are the next Missy Franklin or Michael Phelps. Even if your ability in water isn’t persuasive, your contagious enthusiasm is. Surely it is out of question, particularly since you are not drowning anymore, to return to school before September 15, yes?

7. The starry nights of summer are enlivened by the thrilling sight of shooting stars. With mom and dad, you marvel at the celestial objects streaking across the sky one warm and late August night. As you start naming the various meteor showers and the constellation they spring from, your dad tells you that unless you shut up, he is going indoors. You become silent and hug him and tell him astronomy is in your blood and if only you can hone your expertise for just three more weeks, unencumbered by homework and tests, you can become another Tycho Brahe. Tyke who? he asks, alarmed. You sigh. Dad is embarrassed. Alright, he says, alright, but if your grades don’t move north by Novemmber, all bets are off.

8. For the rest of us, start reading the Collected Works of William Shakespeare and the Collected Prose of Woody Allen, alternating between the two. Othello followed by Without Feathers. Midsummer Night’s Dream followed by Play It Again, Sam. Once you are done, pick up “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust but stop when you come to the part about madeline and memory. Thereafter, simply indulge in madelines until your memory turns upside down and you begin to see dead people. Even if time doesn’t stand still, you will find that it has started to crawl. And that will be enough to add a few more weeks to summer.

Summer was always meant to stay longer than it does, at least in these frenetic times. Unlike the weather, however, we can do something about it. The list is limited only by the imagination. And isn’t summer the season of imagination?

Two Movies

You have to have the patience of a tree to enjoy “The Tree of Life.” That’s the problem in this enigmatic and “cosmic” movie. Normally we don’t go to the theater to test our patience; we go mostly to have a good time. It can be a thriller, a comedy, a tragedy, a whatever, as long as it engages and surprises us, makes us laugh or maybe even cry.

But “The Tree of Life” that won the Palme d’Or Prize this year, the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival, doesn’t quite fit any category. It is too arty for its own good and the viewer is left wondering if director Terrence Malick isn’t trying too hard to impress with big ideas.

The story itself is actually quite moving. It follows the ups and downs – mostly downs - of the O’Brien family in the small town of Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. The father (Brad Pitt) is a stern and humorless patriarch who looks down on his three sons because he feels they do not measure up to him. They are not macho enough, intelligent enough and gifted enough. He is, of course, tragically oblivious of his own fundamental failings. The mother (Jessica Chastain) clings to the idea that love alone can conquer all and tries to bring a sense of normalcy to her children’s upbringing with grace and sweetness. When the middle child dies, she looses her poise. “Lord, why? Where were you? Who are we to you? Answer me?” her character asks in whispered voice-overs.

While life at home for the three kids is a fearful drill of taking orders from the father (“Don’t call me dad, call me father”), outside is an idyllic world of grass and sky and stream and meadows and friends. These impressionistic snippets are redolent of universal childhood and Malick captures them with sensitivity. What makes them also poignant is the tension at home.

At the ritualistic family dinner, one of the children cannot take the father’s overbearing behavior anymore and asks him to “keep quiet.” “What did you say?” screams the father. He grabs the child and locks him in a room. “You have turned my children against me,” he shouts at his wife. “You undermine everything I try to do.” The hunter is defending himself by claiming to be the hunted!

The wife has had enough. She retaliates by pushing him away. He immobilizes her with a viselike grip and releases her only when convinced that the last ounce of her resistance has sipped away.

But the father is not a one-dimensional character. He has the capacity for tenderness, even if not realized. As he prepares to play the piano one day, his middle son begins to strum on a guitar in the porch. The father hesitates, shocked by the musical gift of his son, and refrains from playing until the son has finished strumming. What makes the scene heartbreaking is the father’s inability to express his love and admiration. He simply cannot bring himself to say, “Son, that was lovely. Play for me more.”

All this would have made a touching, growing-up story of childhood, sadness, tragedy and ultimate redemption but Malick sandwiches it between heavy symbolism and metaphors that seem to take up the bulk of the movie’s 2 ¼ hours. We are treated to an interminable stretch of the creation of the universe, volcanoes, waves, dinosaurs, planets, asteroids and everything in between, just in case you miss the point that the director deals with heavy-duty ideas of chance, life, morality and mortality. The cinematography is gorgeous (I kept thinking it was the movie version of the great photographer Ernst Haas’s book, The Creation), but what’s the point? Just get on with the story, I wanted to tell Malick, and let us decide what to make of the impenetrable, big questions of life.

I will still recommend this movie because it shows what a father ought not to do to be a good father. Although “The Tree of Life” is a period piece from mid-20^th century, it is shocking how many fathers in our days are still stuck in that mindset. Fatherhood is fraught with tension, indifference, arrogance and often, downright cruelty. With Father’s Day coming up this Sunday, “The Tree of Life” is a movie a father should give as a gift to himself, to become the antithesis of the character portrayed by Brad Pitt.

*

“Midnight in Paris” is a delightful ode to the Jazz Age Paris of the 1920s when heavyweights of literature, painting, movies and music took up residence in the City of Light. It is Woody Allen’s most imaginative work to-date and connects the past to the present to put our preoccupation with money and fame in context. Unlike Allen’s recent movies, heavy with ambiguity and symbolism and the dark currents flowing in the human heart, “Midnight” is a beguiling movie to savor for its romance, charm and humor.

Gil is a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter (Owen Wilson) who travels from Southern California to Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) with the idea of settling down there. He is fed up with Hollywood. He has no desire writing scripts on-demand by tyrannical conglomerates. He wants to put the finishing touches to a novel that he dreams will set the literary world on fire when published. He wants this to happen in the artistic center of the Universe - Paris.

His fiancée, of course, has other ideas. Inez is as materialistic as they come, an epitome of conspicuous consumption. Ditto her parents who are also visiting Paris. The clash of the couple’s opposing life-view must be resolved, but how?

Walking back to his hotel alone one night, Gil loses his way in the alleys of Paris. At the stroke of midnight, a magical kind of taxi pulls up as he sits exhausted by the pavement. Its passengers invite him to join them. He is hesitant but buoyed by their enthusiasm, gets in. He is brought to a soiree where he runs into … Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and Ernest Hemingway. He has traveled across time and arrived at the Paris of 1920s!

The seamless way in which Allen does this is itself magical. As the midnight encounters continue on subsequent nights, Gil meets Picasso, Gertrude Stein (who promises to review his manuscript), Matisse, Salvador Dali, T.S. Eliot, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and many others. Allen leavens the story with parodies of these famous characters. His parody of Hemingway, clipped sentences and all (“No subject is terrible if the story is true and if the prose is clean and honest”), is particularly hilarious.

Stein approves of Gil’s novel and that decides the issue for him. He will settle in Paris to pursue his literary muse. Inez throws a fit but only for a few minutes. She adjusts, the quintessential material girl, and banishes Gil from her life.

The movie ends on a happy note, though, and you find making a mental note to yourself: “I am going to have to see this movie one more time.”