December 2020

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Do the Work

There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.

Indira Gandhi

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Enjoy the View

Driveways – A woman and her young son travel across country to empty her sister’s house after her death. She was a hoarder, and there is much more work than anticipated. The process and their initial discomfort at the daunting task and the neighborhood in general soon vanishes when the son befriends the big-hearted, no nonsense next door neighbor. Such tenderness.

Always Worthy – A joyful train wreck of a fil-um following the life of a struggling actress in Los Angeles.

Mary & Mike – My first Chilean television series! And WOW, just wow. How I thank my lucky stars not to live in a place where I or people I care about could be murdered or disappeared at the whim of a maniacal dictator and his legions of Yes Men and Women. The series follows a husband and wife team and their near and far murder spree. Based on a real couple, the husband Michael Townley getting off easy before being ushered into the safety of the U.S. witness protection program for a bombing in Washington D.C. You can’t make this shit up.

Heaven Can Wait – A walk on the less serious side, only forty years or so after it first hit theaters. Warren Beatty plays a football player prematurely taken to heaven by an overzealous guardian angel. He’s sent back and put in the body of another man, where hilarity and quite a bit of mad cap drama ensues.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night – A dreamy wander into the furthest reaches of China, as a man searches for a woman he lost decades earlier. Moody and ever so beautiful.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – I’m not going to insult your intelligence by telling you what this is all about. What I will do? Say how it is as wonderfully evocative as the Westminster Mall twilight showing with my family, way back in 1982. I exited shame-faced at my puffy-eyed mess of tears. Yep.

Bad Words – Jason Bateman plays a man capitalizing on a spelling bee loophole to annihilate the competition, befriend a fellow competitor, and generally wreak havoc for a bit of revenge. Crude and hilarious with a dash of sweetness, too.

Wild Nights with Emily – A fun, informative, and sometimes uproarious history lesson on the life of Emily Dickinson. Quite a bit of her poetry, too. Delightful.

Escape to the Chateau – Oh, gosh, was this a wonderful escape, indeed. A couple (and their two adorable children) buy a chateau in the French countryside to refurbish, live in, and hold posh weddings. They are sweet and loving and funny and such damn hard workers, turning their wreck back into a work of art. I gobbled six seasons in no time flat!

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Mistakes

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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The Unknown

For much of my life, I’ve been the answer person. Colleen knows. Sometimes, I don’t know how I know. The answers perhaps living for eternity in my belly, surfacing with Dewey decimal precision at the exact moment needed. Other times, springing from countless books and passages read and remembered.

This knowing, as one might imagine, is the perennial blessing and curse. Knowledge IS power! That same intelligence, however, when called upon by former friends to settle a score (true story), not so great.

Lately, and perhaps brought upon by this dreaded virus, my knowing has been wholly inadequate. The anxiety of it! When? Where? Why? What about this? The space where my personal Dewey might previously reside, an echoing vacuum keeping me up at night, hours and hours tick-tocking by.

What to do? Initially, I searched myself, one inquiry after another, ad nauseum. Then, with a surprising flourish, the solution to my question. Succinct and really quite brilliant in its simplicity:

All in good time. Answers will come, or not. Be patient and forgiving. Forget the query and go, go, go.

Life with Juniper

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