dual personalities

Tag: Joan Didion

January 19, 2021

A home in that yonder city

by chuckofish

It is January 19 and time to note once again the birthday of our dear mother, Mary, born in 1926. She would be 95! She would not recognize much about our world today and I have no doubt she would feel even more of a pilgrim and a stranger than she did in 1988 when she died.

Be that as it may, I will toast her tonight and watch one of her favorite movies–something with Errol Flynn or John Wayne or possibly Shane. I will remember sitting in the darkened theater with her and how she would lean over and whisper to me to notice something special. I will think of her in that house by the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.

P.S. Happy Birthday to Dolly Parton, who as you know, celebrates her birthday on this date as well. Happy 75th!

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December 3, 2012

A Monday pick-me-up

by chuckofish

wayne301

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened hut which served as a theatre, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow’.
As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

–Joan Didion, John Wayne, a Love Song

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