To Write Love on Her Arms - The Devastation of Regret

I was planning to post a different blog today. One devoted to my mother and grandmother and their unholy penchant for wearing wigs. But then it came to my attention that today is To Write Love on her Arms Day, and somehow everything else just fell away.

I lost a very dear friend this summer to the ravages of sadness and despair and though I continue to move forward, there is a piece of my heart that will always belong to a fellow writer named Will and the friendship he offered me a long time ago.

The thing about mental illness is that it tends to diminsh the people who valiantly survive it in the eyes of those who don't understand - so that the person who is struggling isn't afforded the respect they deserve.

As such, it has become very important to me to convey to anyone who knew Will that he was my friend not just because I adored him, but because I respected him.

I respected his heart, and his kindness, his wit, intelligence, incredible sense of humour, and his ability to detect bullshit.

People, you don't realize what it means to have a world class bullshit detector on your side until they're gone.

*silence*

Because I've written love on my arms today, I've decided to resurrect Will's second favourite blog written by me.

(his first favourite is one titled The Naked Fart, which I'm planning to repost in his honour, one time only, at a later date)

In truth, though, it's incredibly difficult for me to re-read the following because from start to finsish, it's all about our friendship.

It breaks my heart that at no time during the writing of this I had any idea what the words would come to mean to me later.

Will, wherever you are, I love you...



The Bastardization of Literary Classics

One of my favourite books of all time is Charlotte's Web.

I loved it as a little kid, but love it even more as an adult because it speaks to universal themes like love, loyalty, and friendship.

There is a spiritual and poetic depth to EB White's writing that transcends age and takes the reader on a journey straight to the heart and back to the realm of possibility again. To the idea that all things are possible if we have support.

But the book is also heartbreaking, because it tackles more than friendship. It teaches the reader - both child and adult - lessons about life, and love, and letting go.

About the natural order of things. That for each of us, there is a time to live, and a time to die.

So you can imagine my hesitance at watching the newest Hollywood version of Charlotte's Web as a movie.

First of all, because I'm the biggest sap you will ever meet in your life - and as I've gotten older, I've learned to go easy on any kind of movie that might be too emotional for me.

This because I can honestly give myself an emotional hangover if I let myself become overly invested in a book or movie.

There are some movies around which I cry from the opening credits to the final scene.

Some examples include: The Notebook, A.I., My Life (with Michael Keaton), Titanic, and Tuesday's with Morrie.

For this reason, I very rarely see a movie at the theatre because I've been blind sided more than once. I've blogged about this before, but does anyone remember that happy holiday favourite Jack Frost?

The one where the little boy's dad gets killed in a car accident and comes back the next winter as a snowman?

The movie caught me completely by surprise. I was expecting a singing and dancing snowman and was instead faced with questions about my own mortality in a crowded matinee filled with children under age ten and their respective guardians.

Of course, it goes without saying that I made PUBLIC SPECTACLE of myself - especially when the snowman turns back into the father and then goes toward the light...

I've also been known to give myself migraines from holding back emotion at public events like parades and flag raisings, and I spent 20 minutes in a bathroom stall at the Capris theatre bawling my eyes out in 1990 after watching "Dances with Wolves."

"I call you friend."

My Good God.

The thing is, once I get started the tears have to run their course. I can't just shut them off.

Don't even get me started on Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

So you can imagine my trepidation at seeing my favourite book of all time once again being brought to film.

The book that I couldn't get through while reading it to TH when he was eight years old because from the moment I got to the first few paragraphs of "Last Day"

"Your success in the ring this morning was, to a small degree, my success. Your future is assured. You will live, secure and safe, Wilbur. Nothing can harm you now...."


I couldn't keep myself together - so that by the time I got to

"She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people what had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died."

My eight year old son had to take over and read the rest of the book to me.

And you might as well all know that I just got up in me middle of typing this to get more kleenex.

Talk amongst yourselves.



But I felt trepidation before finally watching the movie - which is what I did last night after TH and the Pool Boy went to bed.

Trepidation on two levels.

First of all would I be able to handle it - or would the movie reduce me to a mass of beat up emotional wreckage. Wasted on the couch in a pool of kleenex and memory.

And more importantly, would the movie do justice to one of the best books ever written for children - or would they turn it into another dumbed down, vapid, surface skimming, insult to people who have cherished this particular story their entire lives...

A story that, ever since they were seven years old and sitting in Mrs. Cameron's grade two class after her parents divorced - the same teacher who knit each of us a pair of mittens for Christmas, and read Charlotte's Web because she knew that children are bright enough to to recognize things like beauty, and art, and literature and don't need to hear innocuous drivel from barnyard animals voiced over by Oprah in order to be entertained - a story that they have held dear for all these years and even though it's about a spider, it is still a requirement that the full range of her spiritual beauty be conveyed on the screen, not just through the use of special effects, but by sticking as closely as possible to the dialogue and character as originally written by E.B. White - that to not do so would be akin to barbarism the likes of which I might not ever get over.

Would the movie be able to do that?

WOULD IT?

I guess we already know the answer to that.

Because even though the previews were magical and left me hopeful, the minute the movie began and the narrator began his bastardized version of Chapter One, I was pissed.

And not just from the crantini I drank earlier.

Trying to slip changes into the wording of Charlotte's Web on me is like trying to change the words in Deuteronomy on Billy Graham.

In other words, I was onto them from the first shot of rolling hills

I mean, why didn't they just stick to passages actually written in the book?

Because without those, without dialogue like:

"Oh, Charlotte," he said. "To think that when I first met you I thought you were cruel and bloodthirsty!"

When he recovered from his emotion, he spoke again.

"Why did you do all this for me?" he asked. "I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you."

"You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

Without the actual dialogue from the book, the movie fell flat.

We got the gist - but the movie failed to convey the depth and substance of the love between Wilbur and Charlotte.

For God's sakes, they had movie love, dammit, like Frodo and Sam

Peter Jackson, by the way, deserves to be knighted for his version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy - which, to my mind, is a masterpiece.

But not so much Charlotte's Web.

It was all style and little substance.

I didn't feel like I got to know any of the characters - least of which, the barnyard animals, around which Oprah was the most grating goose ever.

Which leaves a whole gaggle of movie goers who have never read the book missing out. Though I'm sure kids enjoyed the movie - it could have been so much richer.

If all we give kids is action and special effects, they will never learn to appreciate dialogue and good writing.

And kids are bright enough to resonate with the magic that poured forth from EB White's pen.

"These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, and the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur—this lovely world, these precious days..."


Why did they leave that out?

Why?

But this is nothing new. Hollywood has destroyed more books than I can list.

And I live with the hopeful certainly that those children who are meant to read the book still will.

That thirty years from now there will be an adult or two out there who remembers the first time they heard the name Charlotte A. Cavatica - and it was at a library, not a theatre.

Thankfully, though, the movie got one thing right - the last line:

"Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."

And so was Will.

***

Today, with the love I never fully expressed written all over my arms, I am left with the lonesome realization that "If I had the chance again" is among the saddest of phrases.

I never said "I'll stand by you" - though I lived it and thought it and believed it, I never said it. And that, my friends is something I will have to live with for the rest of my life.