Jim Mayzik SJ Blog

It was a beautiful day.   78 degrees, no humidity, the wind blowing ever so gently, you could feel it playing tag around your body, the hairs on your arms and legs moving this way and then that, and the summer sun bathing everything in warm, clear light.   Everyone was out, it was one of those days when people would tell you to go outside, ‘its too nice to be working inside’. People were sitting on benches, walking leisurely with friends, laying on any small grassy areas to read a book, take in the sun, or watch the people going by.   I was having a ball, it was my day off, I was in lower Manhattan, it was just a perfect day to be in the city.

Short narrative film.  We witness a mother giving birth to her child. Rather than seeing things on a realistic level, we follow things happening on a more metaphorical side.The focus of the action is the challenge of birth, which presents itself as an extreme situation in which it becomes literally a matter of life and death.

There is something about the first days of Summer when the light dawns so early and retires so late: you have a sense, especially if you are a child, that all the darkness has been conquered and there is only endless light.  

In the first days of Summer all the rules are relaxed, the responsibilities lightened–you wear clothing that is comfortable, you eat food with your fingers, you let the water soothe your bones and the sun warm your skin without guilt. You can be more honest in the summer, let everything go hang. You take a vacation from where you are and live in the place you really believe in, where you’re hope is and your dreams, where you can imagine that anything is possible, most especially love.

Almost every day for several years, an answering machine would turn on at 2003 Clove Road.  The words that came from the device’s speaker would address an empty house--its occupant on her daily whirlwind of a day, hopping across the Island from school to church to school to school to church. It was Bernie Kelly’s 86 year-old voice that would rebound from the living room to the kitchen to the music room to the bedroom, reciting the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet #43 (abridged) :

Short narrative film.  This is how I imagine Sandy Gargaloni being welcomed into Heaven.  From the film "Holy Motors".

Sandra Gargaloni, gone to God, June 21, 2017.

Poem Share:

I once shoplifted
a tin of Vienna sausages.
Crouched in the aisle
as if to study the syllables
of preservatives, tore off the lid,
pulled out a wiener and sucked it down...
 

Some weeks ago up in Connecticut, I was lazily biking down a quiet neighborhood street around dinnertime, passing a house with lots of cars in front of it, and suddenly I was engulfed in this overwhelming aroma of barbecue.  Burning charcoal, sweet fat, savory essence of beef, a hint of spices--in the sausage, perhaps--pungent bouquet of marinade.  My eyes got watery, my nose began to run, my stomach began to growl--oh, the joy of this gastronomic perfume in the air!

I wasn’t sure exactly what Phil and Ana were asking me to do at this wonderful event, but it was billed on the program as a reading.  A reading of what, I wondered? Perhaps a poem. In the first summer that I really came to know Phil, I was grateful to share my love of poetry with him. I believe that was the summer when he also realized the poetic expression that can realized in filmmaking.

Short documentary film. Charles "LaLa" Evans and his wife Louise were together for 59 years and 11 months. Over the course of their marriage they took thousands of photographs together, capturing moments both big and small. When Louise passed away suddenly just one month shy of their 60th anniversary, Charles was determined to honor her memory using those pictures. So he created a museum in the backyard of their Mississippi home dedicated to their lifetime of love.

Poem Share:

Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We'll
be seeing you, or I'll call, or Stop in,
somebody's always at home?...

Wǒ bù huì shuō zhōngwén (我不会说中文). Wǒ bù huì shuō zhōngwén. Wǒ bù huì shuō zhōngwén. I don’t speak Chinese.  I was practicing that phrase, trying to memorize it as I began walking along streets that were filled with hundreds and hundreds of Chinese people on motor scooters in the first city I was visiting in that country. 

A few years ago I was driving on a rural road in Connecticut at dusk during the magic hour--that 20 minute period of indirect light in the morning or afternoon that cinematographers love when the sun is just below the horizon and the landscape glows under a beautiful golden sky.  I remember wondering as I was driving if heaven had a gorgeous landscape of trees and meadows and merry brooks like the ones I was passing on this road.

Short narrative film. Having fun with the word "fan" and the person "Fanning".

POEM SHARE:

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them...

A few years ago I was on my way to the student residence where I said a weekly evening Mass in a lounge. A fierce storm with crazy thunder and lightning had just passed over the town, and I passed a street where a tree had fallen and pulled down the power lines that were right beside it.  A large wire had been detached, and it was dancing on the ground with sparks shooting out of one end.  Everyone nearby was giving it wide berth, afraid of course that it they strayed too close they would be electrocuted.

Short documentary film.  The beauty of art: hip-hop ballet.

Get some sleep.

Eat an orange every morning.

Be friendly. It will help make you happy.

Hope for everything. Expect nothing...

I spent Monday afternoon at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan with an alumnus of Fairfield University, where I have been teaching. The museum has become famous in recent years for being featured in the movie Night at the Museum and its two sequels. In those movies, the exhibited stuffed animals and dummy statues of Neanderthals and Native Americans and Theodore Roosevelt all come to life at night, causing mayhem and chaos for a newly-hired night watchman played by Ben Stiller.

Short narrative film.  The struggle and the miracle and the love of living.