I better make an editorial disclaimer, however: I hope that any gay readers will understand that the words I put in Fred Noonan's mouth were the words I would expect from a 1937 heterosexually straight man with problems with alchoholism, and do not reflect the feelings of the author, just of Fred Noonan's times and possible prejudices. I hope the sobering realization that the light of the Renaissance and the hope of the future came very close to being burned at the stake because of similar prejudices---will make many people think.

End of advertisement.

We went to see THE OTHERS this afternoon, and probably most people are surprised I haven't see it before this. Yet things have been so busy lately with school opening that I haven't seen a movie in weeks. Barb saw it one afternoon, when the PRINCESS DIARIES were sold out during Labor Day and liked it, and more, though I would like it even more than she did.

She was right.

It was very much in the same vein as Henry James' THE TURN OF THE SCREW or Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, that was made into the superb movie, THE HAUNTING...which unaccountedly bored both Brian and Barb. Still, they both really liked THE SIXTH SENSE, which mined the same vein. This was a slow, subtle ghost story with a surprise ending. I found out things I didn't know before---I hadn't realized the Channel Islands had been occupied during World War II.

I won't give away the ending, but I will say this. I knew a surprise ending was coming, and after THE SIXTH SENSE, I was trying different varieties of explanations. Mentally, I was saying to myself, Okay, so-and-so is alive and such-and-such is a ghost. No that won't work. Maybe such-and-such is alive and so-and-so's the ghost...

The result? I never, ever, guessed the central fact. I came close once or twice, but never got it exactly right. Very well done. Nicole Kidman as a stuffy religiously obsessed woman just after World War II with two kids who had a rare condition that made them allergic to daylight was the best I've ever seen her, showing her acting abilities to the max. The kids were great too, especially the young girl.

Highly recommended.

There was one distraction, and it wasn't much of one...just before the movie started, while they were still doing the previews, some people came in, and some of them were giggling. Later, we realized there were two small kids up there.

I can appreciate that it's sometimes hard to get a babysitter, but I would have rather taken kids to a porn flick or a slasher flick than this. This was seriously scary, and is the stuff of which nightmares are made on young impressionable minds.

Luckily, they took the kids out at least twice, and they didn't make enough noise to be really annoying. Maybe they were too young---they didn't look more than six, and may have been as young as three--to understand what was happening.

Still, you have to wonder about some parents.

Afterwards, we went to visit Jamie's grave. That sounds like an odd juxtaposition, but this particular theatre was very close to the place Jamie's buried. The place looks fine, and grass is finally growing where Jamie is buried.

There's a sort of joy in seeing any sort of life there, you know? That Death wins battles, but loses the war, or something.

My father and my paternal grandparents were buried nearby, and took a look at the dates of their birth and death dates, something I never looked at before. Pop was born in 1927 and died in 1995. Okay, that much I knew. Yet I was surprised to see my grandfather, Albert William Schroeder senior, who died in 1958 when I was four or five--- was born as early as 1882, and my grandmother, Hazel Brooks Schroeder, who died in 1960 when I was six or seven, was born in 1893.

I wasn't aware that there was an eleven-year-difference between my paternal grandparents' ages. I hadn't realized that my grandfather had been forty-five when my father was born, and my grandmother had been a relatively old thirty-four to have her first---and last child.

How many years did they try to have a baby? I don't know when they were married. I know my father when young had often suspected he was adopted, but wasn't. Given how old his parents were, I can understand the suspicion.

One of these days I need to compose a detailed family tree.

Hmmm. All of my activities today somehow dive into the past. Ahhh, well...makes for a nice change of pace. You can't know where you're going...until you know where you've been.