Music in the Afternoon

Yesterday morning, shortly after I finished my blog post, I put the last load of stuff in the car, and thought, why am I just sitting here, reading various internet sites.  So, about 6:40, I got in the car and headed south to Williamsburg, Virginia, where I am spending half a week with my parents.  

I have decided that it's impossible for me to know how long it will take for me to cover the distance between my seminary apartment and my parents' house.  Yesterday I did it in less than two hours.  In the past, it has taken as much as 3.5 hours because there can be construction that brings everything to a slow, slow pace (or no pace).  

We spent the morning drinking coffee, chatting, working on tech issues, looking at photos, and then we ate lunch.  After lunch, I pulled out my stitching, and my dad worked on one of his projects, sorting through cassette tapes.  I wrote this Facebook post:  "While Mom is napping, I am stitching a quilt by the fire, and my dad and I are listening to cassette tapes (Three Dog Night, Dan Fogelberg, and now Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young), singing a bit ("Teach Your Children Well"), and it feels like I've fallen through a hole in time, sharing music with my dad this way, and I am so grateful that we are still alive and that my dad has a cassette player that works and that he kept some of his old tapes."

I didn't write about the sound quality of the tape, the strange quality that the music takes on as the tape reaches the end of a side.  It's something I had forgotten.  I said to my dad, "I once had all this music on vinyl, of all things."  My dad said, "I still have them," and then we looked at some of the LPs.  What a joy.

We had thought about going to see a movie in the afternoon, but it was a cold, blustery day, so we stayed in.  We all wanted to see the movie Tar, and I knew that we could see it on Amazon for $5.99, which was far less than we would have paid if we all went to a movie theatre.  We were a bit confused by the credits rolling by at the start of the movie, an aspect of the film I hadn't heard about--at first, we wondered if we had clicked on the wrong button and fast forwarded the movie.

I had read a lot about this movie, enough to make me want to see it, enough to make me wary.  I expected the character to be much more monstrous than she turned out to be.  Was she monstrous at all?  I realize that there's a lot of understated elements, so maybe I'll see the monstrous elements later, as I reflect.  Right now, I think of her as a person I wouldn't want for a partner, a teacher, or an employer, but her actions turned out to be less monstrous than I was expecting.  There's a protégé who has fallen out of favor and gone on to a disastrous end, but after watching the movie, I can't be sure of who is responsible for that.  She treats her assistant both generously and callously, as she does many of the people in her life.  To dismiss her as all monster is to diminish the movie--I think.

We may watch the movie again.  Because we rented it, we can watch it over and over again for 2 days.  We're thinking we may watch it with the closed captioning on--parts of the movie were hard to hear, in a muffled sound kind of way.  We wondered if closed captioning would help, and this afternoon, we might see.