by Carmen Mason
When I was nine or ten my mother wrote me a letter to the manager of the Loews American movie house in Parkchester in the Bronx.
She asked that I be permitted to attend the second showing of the two movies, News report and the short cartoons as the children who came at noon were loud and obnoxious and I was seriously in love with every movie I would see there. Thankfully he agreed once she told him my father was dying from Multiple Sclerosis so he was totally behind my mother’s request.
I would arrive every Saturday at twenty minutes to three, pay quickly for my popcorn and my Good and Plentys and as the lights were just about to turn low and the thick velvet curtains were about to open and the music begin to play, I would slowly walk down to the very center of the first row.
Carefully resting my jacket (or coat) and my popcorn and Good and Plentys on the empty chair next to me I would slowly sit down, arrange myself comfortably in the middle of my seat (I was very skinny) and place my goodies in my lap. I was filled with euphoria. My joyful (although sometimes scary) world was about to encase me and I would forget for those hours anything else in the world.
I saw many wonderful movies and cartoons and news reports through those early years but for me The Red Shoes, Samson and Delilah and Lili became some of my all time favorites!
Now there was a particular moment before rising to leave and to gather myself up and depart that I carefully, deeply, seriously and softly whispered to myself and this is what I would quietly say:
Carmen, one day you will never ever return here or any place else anywhere you have ever treasured throughout your life. You will be gone forever. All your loved ones will have said goodbye and you will become the earth and the grass and the flowers that will flourish and nourish the earth.
There was never a day I would forget to do this.
Carmen Mason has been writing poetry and prose throughout her life and has won a few prizes (including Seventeen Magazine’s International first prize short story contest when she was seventeen) and a few other poetry prizes in her senior years. She is, therefore she writes.