We should have been tougher

Commentary

My son texted from Texas on Thursday that he had lost electricity after going several days without water. It had snowed again that day as well and the pool was still open.

He was grumpy.

I looked at my worried wife and said, “We were too easy on him. We should have been tougher when he was growing up.”

“What do you mean,” she asked.

“We shouldn’t have heated the house,” I said and then regaled her my memories of drafty homes and little heat when we were first married.

For those of us who have grown up in the Northeast, we all carry a certain badge of honor in surviving winter after winter after winter. We have years and years of experience. Those folks in Texas don’t have that. 

I grew up in Connecticut and thought the winters were bad enough until I experienced the cold in Plattsburgh where the temperature always seemed below zero, and for one two week stretch 30 below zero and you needed a scarf to breath through.

By the time my wife and I were married a couple years later, we had moved on to Oneonta and rented a house on Goodyear Lake. It really wasn’t much more than a “camp” with no insulation, no basement and electric heat that we could not afford to turn on.

Our alternative heating was a kerosene heater that we kept on at all the time in the living room. We would sit in the living room watching television with sweatshirts and hats on and we often could see our breath.

My son grew up with the wood stove keeping us toasty warm.

The electricity was out for just a few hours, but my son still did not have any water. The novelty of the freak cold snap and ice storm had worn off. We did inform him that it would be 70 degrees in San Antonio by next Wednesday.

That is something we will not see around here for at least two months.

Invisible sports

I was sorry to see local officials had banned all media from attending high school sports, including the Post-Star photographer. It was even sadder to see that Queensbury officials had decided to abandon the winter season all together.

Obviously, the most important things is to have kids back in school and that should take precedence over everything else.

Movies to remember

Movies have always been a big part of our lives and during the pandemic they have become essential.

Every couple days, I will search through what old movies Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is showing and record one or two. At any given time I have 20 to 30 movies taped and ready to go. Some were taped over a year ago. Some are classics I have seen, others are movie that I missed over the years.

This past week, I saw two classics that had escaped my attention over the years - “Roman Holiday” and “Mrs. Miniver.” They are great movies.

Watching “Roman Holiday,” an old-fashioned love story, made me want to get on the next plane and experience Rome again as soon as possible.

“Mrs. Miniver” gave some perspective to the pandemic we are all living through. The movie is about a family living south of England as World War II begins. The son enlists in the RAF, the father participates in the rescue at Dunkirk, the mother captures a downed German pilot and the family experiences regular air raids as German bombers fly overhead.

Watching the family huddled together in an air raid shelter outside their home as bombs exploded all around them made the pandemic seem pretty mild indeed.

It also reminded me of the stories my mother told about her own experience during World War II - she was just 11 in Belfast, Northern Ireland at the outset of the war - and remembered the Germans bombing the city three times. All the children were eventually evacuated to the country.

Movies for the weekend

Hollywood awards season has always been one of my favorite times of year. The Golden Globe nominees came out a couple weeks ago and I’ve been trying to watch all the nominees.

In my house, movies are divided into two categories: Misery movies and everything else. My wife won’t watch any of the misery movies.

I’ve been trying to get her to watch “Judas and the Black Messiah” - a movie about the Blank Panthers movement in the 1960s - but she won’t bite. 

I watched “Pieces of a Woman” the other day - classic misery movie about a woman whose baby dies during childbirth.

My favorite new movie this week was a documentary “Dick Johnson is Dead.” The documentary filmmaker gets her father to agree to be the subject of her film as he faces the end of his life and Alzheimer’s. My favorite part is where she arranges to have everyone attend her father’s funeral for the movie - eulogies and all - and her father gets to watch.

There were tears by the time I finished that one.