You would
think from the Sir Winston Churchill quote on today's Chalkboard that I must be
going through hell.
I am not.
Unless taking a twenty-year-old and a seventeen-year-old to a matinee on
a beautiful Sunday afternoon qualifies. We are going to see a movie the three of us have watched
approximately 3,759 times over the years, “Cars.”
It was released twenty years ago, which
seems impossible because I remember when Lightning McQueen, Mater and Radiator
Springs first became part of the Shepley household. We had the DVD, we watched it on television,
we streamed it.
We watched it in the morning. We watched
it at night. We watched it enough times that there was a period of my life when
I probably knew more about the Piston Cup standings than the American League
Central.
But the Shepley brothers have never seen
it where a movie is supposed to be seen, on the big screen.
So for its twentieth anniversary, that is
exactly what we are doing and there is something pretty damn cool about that. The little boys who once sat on the couch
watching Lightning McQueen are now twenty and seventeen, and their
sixty-year-old father gets to sit between them in a movie theater and watch it
all over again.
Afterward, we are heading over to my
mother-in-law's house for a Labor Day get together. Burgers, bratwursts, hot dogs, cold beer, a
cigar, the Shepkids and my gorgeous ex-wife.
Okay…
Maybe Churchill was onto something with
the going-through-hell business.
At least I didn't wake up this morning with some goddamn hippie song
stuck in my head, wondering where I belong in the universe.
I know exactly where I belong today.
In a dark movie theater with my boys watching a red race car learn that
there are more important things in life than winning. Then in a backyard with
people who have been part of my life since the new millennium began.
Maybe that is enough philosophy for one weekend.
Yesterday I needed a rugby scrum, and a Chicago hotdog stand to find my
way home.
Today I need Lightning McQueen, a bratwurst, and my ex-wife.
Sunday Funday, Chalkheads, a day
filled with gusto and astonishment.
Ka-chow.
