The prodigal returns soon at a screen near you
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- February 8, 2025
- 573
It’s been a year unlike any other, the return of the native son, the prodigal, the wanderer, the one who always meant to come home but never thought he would, and now that he has, God help him.
Christmas finally ended last weekend when I packed away the Lionel electric train set that had been set up around the tree’s base since early December, which was followed in short order by the systematic disassembly of the tree itself — first the shimmering tinsel, then the shiny ornaments, culminating in the removal of the thousand or so lights and, inevitably, the boughs and the spine and the stand of the artificial evergreen that has been in my wife’s family ever since the mid-’70s.
Every year she threatens to get a new one, and every year I defend its right to exist, presuming I’m still willing and able to make it festively presentable. It’s an ongoing tradition, much like Christmas itself, something important, vital even, that gives the end of the year meaning, clarity and eventually, closure.
When I reflect on where (and who) I was in late 2023 and all that’s transpired since then, the good and the weird, it seems like a dream.
Of course, that’s a simplistic and rather facile way to think about life when upheaval is the main course and confusion is the soup of the day, but it satisfies me. I used to keep a dream journal in the top drawer of the bedside table so that when I’d had a particularly vivid and potentially revelatory sleep intrusion, I could jot it down.
One thing I inherited from my father, aside from his height, weight and prematurely silver hair, is his handwriting, which can be most charitably described as polygraph erratic or chicken-scratch chic.
So upon waking and perusing my spontaneous, scrawled recollections, which I hoped would lead to great thoughts and insights, I was chastened to see illegible, unreadable nonsense.
One sure thing I can attest to, without fear of contradiction, is the fact that a lot of my restless REM sleep was spent in my hometown.
The school I attended, for example, was frequently the scene of my interior imaginings, some of them ridiculously specific and amazingly accurate. In one recurrent dream, I was back in the basement classroom where I spent my fifth, sixth and seventh grade years. The windows were at street level, which meant in order to open and close them, you needed a long pole with a hook on the end, a way to grab the latch 15 feet over your head. It took a practiced hand to avoid punching out the panes, but as with most problematic pursuits, repetition made for reliable muscle memory.
Sadly, that school is no longer in use, though it still stands, which can’t be said about the modest church that was the site of so many important events: Baptisms, weddings, funerals … it’s long gone.
Same with the junior high, razed and replaced by a grim, vacant lot.
Thankfully, my little town has, to my eyes anyway, largely abandoned its sad history of tearing down the old edifices for expediency’s sake and has, instead, begun restoring and repurposing them, and I, for one, stand and applaud my approval.
I had heard, through the Ohio-to-Carolina grapevine that I relied on for nearly 25 years, that the tide had turned and that progressive leadership had taken up the mantle of preserving the past while, at the same time, focusing on the future, not an easy balancing act.
Which brings us to the downtown theater.
The first movie I saw there was “A Hard Day’s Night.” It was a Saturday in fall 1964, and I remember, as if it were yesterday, kids standing and screaming as if the Beatles were actually there.
Flash forward to winter 2024, a mere 60 years later, and my expatriate wife and I, recently returned to the site of her first steady job, decided to revisit the scene of so many cinematic memories in a place where Batman and the Boy Wonder came to life, where Raquel Welch lit up the screen in “Fantastic Voyage,” the magical portal through which we became part of the winter landscape of “Dr. Zhivago” and the mountainous majesty of “The Sound of Music,” not to mention gritty realism of “Deliverance,” “Platoon” and “Reds” and, surely, the absolutely delightful “Mary Poppins.”
The film we chose for our valedictory was “A Complete Unknown,” which traces Bob Dylan’s metamorphosis from folk singer to rock star, a movie we never imagined would ever come to our little town, it being something just a bit out of the mainstream.
It wasn’t an easy outing. First, I thought we’d park behind the theater as I’d always done, only to find the hardware store had bought all the spots. After relocating near the broom shop, we tried to walk through the alley that had always been a shortcut, only to discover it had been walled off. Then there was the whole ordeal with buying tickets, which involved a touch screen, passwords, seat and row preferences, all this with seven other people inside.
Not that I’m complaining, though I was a bit confused when I trudged up the staircase to use the men’s room, only to find the whole second floor was unlighted including the restroom, which made me feel like an old blind man groping the walls for the urinal.
But at least the place is still vibrantly alive, with aromatic buttered popcorn waiting and movie titles displayed on the marquee, a welcome sign glowing on a winter’s night as Christmas fades away.
May the venerable building itself, reliably and reassuringly intact, remain, in the wise words of Bob Dylan himself, forever young.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol. com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on his Facebook page, where life is waiting in his big-screen imagination.