Love's Labour's Lost

The title would have been cuter if I had actually managed to post this yesterday. Ah, well. There was a terrific episode of "ER" in the early days called "Love's Labor's Lost." It was about a woman who delivers a preterm baby and then the unthinkable happens. I won't spoil it in case you ever come across it on cable and get drawn in. Speaking of heart-rending television drama, I came across "Saving Private Ryan" a few nights ago and said to myself, "Only an hour and fifteen minutes left. I seem to remember the really hard to watch stuff is at the beginning when they storm Normandy. And, gee, I can't remember, DO they indeed Save Private Ryan?" And with that, I broke an important personal movie watching commandment: DO. NOT. EVER. WATCH. WAR. MOVIES. I carved this particular commandment into stone when I was in college and watched "Glory" for extra credit in a history class I was taking. It took me weeks to recover; possibly months. Perhaps I have yet to recover. Then my roommate persuaded me to watch "Platoon" and I couldn't even finish it and still thought I might need to be hospitalized with the trauma. And it seems every couple of years I would think that maybe I could handle it: "A Midnight Clear" which I thought might not be quite AS excruciating because it's about an act of surrender--nope, heart torn to shreds. And the Kenneth Branagh "Henry V", which managed to devastate me in iambic pentameter. Then there were movies that pretended they weren't war movies. "Legends of the Fall" comes to mind. One minute you're watching these glorious vistas of Montana, and the next there's poor Elliot from "E.T." all tangled up and dying in the barbed wire in France. Or "Schindler's List" which I of course knew was going to be terribly upsetting, but I watched it anyway, because I just felt as though I should. Speaking of Schindler, there's an olive tree planted in his memory at Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial outside of Jerusalem. Now there's a place that will cleft your heart in twain. There's a huge pile of shoes. Shoes that belonged to actual people and their actual children who had no idea they were on their way to their horrific end of days. And there is this black cavern with a single candle reflected in thousands of tiny mirrors, the names of the children killed being intoned quietly in the background. My heart is physically aching anew just thinking of it right now. This, my friends, is a very cheery post. So, back to Private Ryan. It turns out there is lots to destroy me in the last hour and fifteen minutes. And yet I couldn't stop watching. I was able to pinpoint what it is that is so terribly upsetting to me, other than the obvious theme that war is a horrible horrible hideous horrible state of affairs. I get incredibly stressed and anxious and horrified in the battle scenes when it's so loud and chaotic and smoky that you can't tell who the Good Guys are. And I really could have lived my whole life without realizing that in the heat of battle, it's as easy to shoot your best friend as it is to shoot the enemy. So then I haven't been able to get past that metaphor and I lie awake in bed imagining what it would be like if we had never been to war ever. Would the world have been destroyed long ago? Would we be speaking Russian? German? French? Arabic? Cherokee?

Now, let's have some happy news. Well, Harper read two books all by herself today: Snow by Uri Shulevitz (she even sounded out 'Shulevitz'!), and The Yellow Ball by Molly Bang. Helena likes to wear Harper's bike helmet, which is much too large.
She's also gotten proficient at pushing her baby in the stroller while holding a tympani mallet.
Baby is pronounced "bubby", which is also the pronunciation for puppy. My kids talk funny, all three. Hudson has been doing lots of actual vacuuming, after first checking with me to make sure that army men do indeed vacuum. Of course I wanted to answer, because of my current bout with war melancholia, that sure, army men vacuum as long as they aren't being shot to bits in a bell tower by a Panzer tank while Edith Piaf softly plays on a victrola.